All Questions

50k views

What data sources are available online?

What sources of financial and economic data are available online? Which ones are free or cheap? What has your experience been like with these data sources?
4k views

Recommendations for books to understand the math in quantitative finance papers?

Can anyone recommend books that explain the math used in quantitative finance academic papers?
2k views

How much data is needed to validate a short-horizon trading strategy?

Suppose one has an idea for a short-horizon trading strategy, which we will define as having an average holding period of under 1 week and a required latency between signal calculation and execution ...
8k views

Efficiently storing real-time intraday data in an application agnostic way

What would be the best approach to handle real-time intraday data storage? For personal research I've always imported from flat files only into memory (historical EOD), so I don't have much ...
8k views

How should I store tick data?

How should I store tick data? For example, if I have an IB trading account, how should I download and store the tick data directly to my computer? Which software should I use?
4k views

How 'High' is the frequency in HFT?

How many trades per second are we talking about? What kind of strategies are used in this time frame? Can the small guy play the game?
2k views

I want to chart the daily returns of a stock, and I'm using Yahoo finance data to download historic data. I was told to use Adjusted Close, but there seems to be an issue with this. For ANTO.L, you ...
2k views

What are some good technical and non-technical books for a math lover to get in to quantitative analysis? [closed]

To get the ball rolling... I will answer this question this evening For people aware & unaware I think it would be a great way to introduce the group, resources for fundamental knowledge & ...
2k views

Has high frequency trading (HFT) been a net benefit or cost to society?

Various studies have demonstrated the very large and growing influence of high frequency trading (HFT) on the markets. HFT firms are clearly making a great deal of money from somewhere, and it stands ...
13k views

I have a very basic data question: how to get a list of all common stocks traded on NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX? I would need to be able to get the approximate list of common stocks as is available in ...
4k views

What is the intuition behind cointegration?

What is the intuition behind cointegration? What does the Dickey-Fuller test do to test for it? Ideally, a non-technical explanation would be appreciated. Say you need to explain it to an investor ...
1k views

How to generate a random price series with a specified range and correlation with an actual price?

I want to generate a mock price series. I want it to be within a certain range and have a defined correlation with the original price series. If I choose, say, oil, I want as many time series which ...
24k views

How can I go about applying machine learning algorithms to stock markets?

I am not very sure, if this question fits in here. I have recently begun, reading and learning about machine learning. Can someone throw some light onto how to go about it or rather can anyone share ...
2k views

What papers have progressed the field of quantitative finance in recent years (post 2000)?

My question is pretty simple: what papers do you feel are foundational to quantitative finance? I'm compiling a personal reading list already, drawn from Wilmott forums, papers referenced in ...
1k views

What are the key risks to the quantitative strategy development process?

Prompted in part by this question on data snooping, I would be interested to know: What are the key risks that should be considered when developing a quantitative strategy based on: (a) historical ...
13k views

How to check if a timeseries is stationary?

I'm using KPSS Method to check if the series is stationary, but I would also like to use another test to confirm if the series is stationary or not, what method coudl I use?
5k views

Any known bugs with Yahoo Finance adjusted close data ?

Yahoo Finance allows you to download tables of their daily historical stock price data. The data includes an adjusted closing price that I thought I might use to calculate daily log returns as a ...
2k views

What exactly is meant by “microstructure noise”?

I see that term tossed around a lot, in articles relating to HFT, and ultra high frequency data. It says at higher frequencies, smaller intervals, microstructure noise is very dominant. What is ...
4k views

How should I calculate the implied volatility of an American option in a real-time production environment?

There are many models available for calculating the implied volatility of an American option. The most popular method, employed by OptionMetrics and others, is probably the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein model. ...
3k views

How to derive the implied probability distribution from B-S volatilities?

The general problem I have is visualization of the implied distribution of returns of a currency pair. I usually use QQplots for historical returns, so for example versus the normal distribution: ...
1k views

How to generate synthetic FX data for backtesting?

I want to generate synthetic forex data for the purpose of backtesting my trading algorithms. I have some rough ideas in mind on how to do this: Start with a curve representing a trend, then randomly ...
1k views

Skewness and Kurtosis under aggregation

Returns possess non-zero skewness and excess kurtosis. If these assets are temporally aggregated both will disappear due to the law of large numbers. To be exact, if we assume IID returns skewness ...
7k views

How to calculate historical intraday volatility?

Sorry for what must be a beginner question, but when I went to write code I realized I didn't understand exactly how historical volatility, or statistical volatility, is defined. Wikipedia tells me ...
7k views

Video lectures and presentations on quantitative finance

What are your favourite video lectures, presentations and talks available online? A few rules: Must be related to quantitative finance. No Economics 101 courses, please. Try to avoid DIY lectures ...
5k views

What concepts are the most dangerous ones in quantitative finance work?

There are a few things that form the common canon of education in (quantitative) finance, yet everybody knows they are not exactly true, useful, well-behaved, or empirically supported. So here is the ...
5k views

What broker/feed/APIsetup allows for recording the most accurate data (cheaply)?

I'm currently using IB's Java API and getting feeds through them. However the real-time feed is updated only every 250ms and the historical feed only every second. I'm primarily looking for ES data ...
7k views

How are correlation and cointegration related?

In what ways (and under what circumstances) are correlation and cointegration related, if at all? One difference is that one usually thinks of correlation in terms of returns and cointegration in ...
3k views

Separating the wheat from the chaff: What quant methods separate skillful managers from lucky ones?

Fund managers are acting in a highly stochastic environment. What methods do you know to systematically separate skillful fund managers from those that were just lucky? Every idea, reference, paper ...
3k views

How do I graphically represent the evolution of a covariance matrix over time?

I am working with a set of covariance matrices evaluated at various points in time over some history. Each covariance matrix is $N\times N$ for $N$ financial time-series over $T$ periods. I would ...
3k views

Time-series similarity measures

Suppose I have two time series $X$ and $Y$ of stock prices. How do I measure the "similarity" of $X$ and $Y$? (I'm being deliberately vague as I don't have a particular application, and I'm curious ...
524 views

Model Validation Criteria

Let's say I have a brand new fancy model on some asset class (calibration porcedure included over a set of vanilla options) in which I truly believe I made a step forward comparing to existing ...
2k views

Earnings and valuation data sources online

Are there any free/cheap sources for historical data on company earnings and valuations? I can get historical price data from Google and Yahoo, and it looks like I can get about five years of ...
4k views

What is a stationary process?

How do you explain what a stationary process is? In the first place, what is meant by process, and then what does the process have to be like so it can be called stationary?
3k views

How does the “risk-neutral pricing framework” work?

I've struggled for a long time to understand this - What is this? And how does it affect you? Yes I mean risk neutral pricing - Wilmott Forums was not clear about that.
2k views

How to design a custom equity backtester?

I was thinking about writing my own backtester and I realize I have to make some assumptions. So I was hoping I could post what I am planning on doing and hopefully some of you can give me some ideas ...
1k views

Looking for a recommendation for a real life volatily trading book.

Recently I started working in an algotrading company as a programmer. After I studied that subject a little in the university and read a book or two in that field I gained a little knowledge in that ...
2k views

How do I calculate the skewness of a portfolio of assets?

I need to calculate the skewness of a portfolio consisting of 6 assets. I know that for that I would need the co-skewness matrix between the assets. Does anybody know the formula for co-skewness or ...
3k views

Using total return calculations is critical in developing security selection models. The standard way to measure total return is to develop a series of price-adjusted data. Investopedia describes the ...
830 views

Setting the r in put-call parity?

Put-call parity is given by $C + Ke^{-r(T-t)} = P + S$. The variables $C$, $P$ and $S$ are directly observable in the market place. $T-t$ follows by the contract specification. The variable $r$ is ...
2k views

How to annualize intra-day volatility on minute data?

I am trying to convert minute based volatility into annualized volatility in such a way that both are comparable. $Vol_{min} * \sqrt(t)$ does not seam to get them into the same scale if I annualize ...
337 views

What do eigenvalues/eigenvectors of the yield/forward rates covariance matrices mean?

I have 5 bonds (with maturities 1,2,3,4,5 years) which I calculated the yield curve for 10 days. I also calculated the forward rates from the yield rates. Now I've been told to calculate the ...
2k views

How to calculate future distribution of price using volatility?

I want to create a lognormal distribution of future stock prices. Using a monte carlo simulation I came up with the standard deviation as being $\sqrt{(days/252)}$ $*volatility*mean*$ $\log(mean)$. ...
3k views

Why does the adjusted closing price take into account dividends?

I'm trying to get an intuition as to why the adjusted closing price includes a dividend adjustment: $$1 - \frac{dividend}{close}$$ I understand why the adjusted closing ...
7k views

Innovative ways of visualizing financial data

Finance is drowning in a deluge of data. Humans are not very good at comprehending large amounts of data. One way out may be visualization. Traditional ways of visualizing patterns, complexities and ...
5k views

How are cryptography and speech recognition technology applied to forecasting financial markets?

One of the answers to my previous question regarding the strategy of Renaissance Technologies, there was a reference to The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly ...
2k views

How do you mix quantitative asset allocation with qualitative views?

Usually in asset allocation you have a quantitative approach (which can be from example mean-variance), but you (or you and your firm) also have a more qualitative approach given market-conditions, ...
8k views

Why does the minimum variance portfolio provide good returns?

I've been a researching minimum variance portfolios (from this link) and find that by building MVPs adding constraints on portfolio weights and a few other tweaks to the methods outlined I get ...
1k views

How do different methods and techniques used in pairs trading compare?

I was going through the paper of Avellaneda (2008) on stat arb and I found it interesting that he uses asset returns vs. their respective ETFs to compute the s-score. I am wondering if anyone has ...
Let the Black-Scholes formula be defined as the function $f(S, X, T, r, v)$. I'm curious about functions that are computationally simpler than the Black-Scholes that yields results that approximate ...