# All Questions

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 ...
2k views

### QuantLib in industry

How much is QuantLib used in industry and how much street cred does it have?
1k views

### Why do some anomalies persist while others fade away?

In their 1990 book, A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street, Andrew Lo and Craig MacKinlay document a number of persistent predictable patterns in stock prices. One of these "anomalies" is variously known ...
4k views

### What types of neural networks are most appropriate for trading?

What types of neural networks are most appropriate for forecasting returns? Can neural networks be the basis for a high-frequency trading strategy? Types of neural networks include: Support Vector ...
5k views

### What is the best way to “fix” a covariance matrix that is not positive semi-definite?

I have a sample covariance matrix of S&P 500 security returns where the smallest k-th eigenvalues are negative and quite small (reflecting noise and some high correlations in the matrix). I am ...
758 views

### How can an ETF outperform its benchmark index?

Deutsche Bank’s ETF platform, db X-trackers, provides a rather remarkable ETF tracking Euro Stoxx 50 (which is the most widely used regional blue-chip index in Europe). What makes it remarkable is ...
967 views

### Tools in R for estimating time-varying copulas?

Are there libraries in R for estimating time-varying joint distributions via copulas? Hedibert Lopes has an excellent paper on the topic here. I know there is an existing packaged called copula but ...
4k views

### Why is volatility mean-reverting?

We all know it does mean revert. The question is why. What's making volatility mean-revert? Is it some sort of cyclical behaviour of option traders? The way it's calculated? Why?
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 ...
9k views

### What are some useful approximations to the Black-Scholes formula?

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 ...
2k views

### Any research on how natural language processing can be used to forecast stocks?

Is there any published research of decent quality linking news or unstructured information to asset returns? I know that Thomson Reuters offers its Machine Readable news (MRN), so somebody must use ...
167 views

### What are the effects of turning a backed currency into a fiat currency?

I hear a lot of debate over the removal of the U.S. Dollar's precious metal backing and the subsequent inflation rates, but is there any proven relationship between unbacked currency and extreme ...
1k views

### How to quickly estimate a lower bound on correlation for a large number of stocks?

I would like to find stock pairs that exhibit low correlation. If the correlation between A and B is 0.9 and the correlation between A and C is 0.9 is there a minimum possible correlation for B and C? ...
1k views

### Local Volatility vs. Stochastic Volatility

Are there any empirical observations or practices when to prefer Local Volatility Model for pricing over Stochastic Model or vice versa?
622 views

### How are distributions for tail risk measures estimated in practice?

Let's say you want to calculate a VaR for a portfolio of 1000 stocks. You're really only interested in the left tail, so do you use the whole set of returns to estimate mean, variance, skew, and shape ...
2k views

### The Application of Quantitative Finance in Sports Betting

I notice that on the surface, there are some similarities between quantitative sports betting and quantitative finance. Both has the concept of arbitaging etc. What are the applications of ...
2k views

### Main backtesting & trading solutions: QuantFactory, Deltix, etc.

What are the most used/mature/promising commercial solutions today which handle backtesting/ automated trading needs? I'm talking about vertical product suites like QuantFactory or Deltix which ...
2k views

### Do you have historical tick data you want to donate?

Do you have historical market/pricing ticket data that you would like to donate to the Open Source Trader project (OST)?? Please: upload your files! Once we gather some data, we'll do our best to ...
621 views

### How do you correct Max Draw-Down for auto-correlation?

When returns are auto-correlated, calculating a Sharpe ratio := $\frac {mean(x)}{\sqrt{var(x)}}$, (where $x$ are the returns) is complicated, but basically solved (see, e.g. Lo (2005)). Without the ...
3k views

### What kind of basic framework or application do you use to run your trading algorithms?

I heard about MetaTrader from http://www.metaquotes.net. Is there any other framework or program available? Do you use different software for backtracking and running your trading algorithms? Thank ...
4k views

### How to identify technical analysis chart patterns algorithmically?

I'm working on a small application that will provide some charts and graphs to be used for technical analysis. I'm new to TA but I'm wondering if there is a way to algorithmically identify the ...
1k views

### How do I adjust a correlation matrix whose elements are generated from different market regimes?

Say I want to calculate a correlation matrix for 50 stocks using 3-year historical daily data. And there are some stocks that were recently listed for one year. This is not technically challenging ...
4k 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.
15k views

### What's the difference between volatility and variance?

How do they differ in what they imply about an underlying's (or any variable's) movement?
2k views

### Evaluating automated trading strategies: accepted practice

Both for private projects, and for clients, I've been working on code a lot this year to evaluate automated trading strategies. This often ends up turning into the task of how to fairly compare apples ...
4k views

### Training set of tick-by-tick data?

I'm looking to find a free source of tick by tick data (<1sec) for training purposes. It doesn't need to be longer than a day, and I don't care what instrument, or exchange, or time it is. I just ...
1k views

### Why is there no “meta-model”?

If I design a trading model, I might want to know the model's half life. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem possible to predict alpha longevity without a meta-model of the market. Intuitively, such a ...
536 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 ...
953 views

### Statistical properties of stochastic processes for moving average trading to work

Common wisdom holds it that a moving average approach is more successful than buy-and-hold. There is quantitative evidence for that across different asset classes (see e.g. this book, or this paper ...
876 views

### When do Finite Element method provide considerable advantage over Finite Differences for option pricing?

I'm looking for concrete examples where a Finite Element method (FEM) provides a considerable advantages (e.g. in convergence rate, accuracy, stability, etc.) over the Finite Difference method (FDM) ...
2k views

### How to forecast volatility using high-frequency data?

There is a large literature covering volatility forecasts with high-frequency tick data. Much of this has surrounded the concept of "realized volatility", such as: "Realized Volatility and ...
515 views

### Tests that any system must pass to be taken seriously

In an interview from '96 Bill Eckhardt points out that there are tests that any system must pass to be taken seriously. That is: tests for (1) overfitting, (2) post-dictiveness, (3) maldistribution ...
552 views

### How do macro funds manage risk and model asset returns? Do they use factor models?

Some of the largest funds in the world are entirely macro-based: Soros, Brevan Howard, Bridgewater. They trade across asset classes, and seemingly with very concentrated allocations. What type of risk ...
742 views

### Diversification, Rebalancing and Different Means

I have found many financial authors making generalizations about GM and AM but they are wrong in certain circumstances. Could someone explain their reasoning? My fact why they are wrong is based ...
2k views

### How random are financial data series?

Pseudorandom number generators are often tested using e.g. a test suite like Diehard tests or Dieharder. If one would run these tests e.g. on stock market time series or other financial data, would ...
789 views

### What is the necessary level of Econometrics-Know-How for a quant

It seems quants increasingly use econometric models at work. As someone who has sold his soul to probability theory and stochastical analysis I would like to catch up. What are the econometric tools ...
2k views

### Can the concept of entropy be applied to financial time series?

I am not familiar with the concept of entropy for time series. I am looking for good reference papers and examples of use.
1k views

### Machine Learning vs Regression and/or Why still use the latter?

I come from a different field (Machine learning/AI/data science), but aim to ask a philosophical question with the utmost respect: Why do quantitative financial analysts (analysts/traders/etc.) prefer ...
3k views

### What tools exist for order book analysis and visualization?

What tools exist for order book analysis and visualization? In particular, if one wanted to examine a limit order book and understand how it changes throughout the day where would you turn for ...
2k views

### Can social media be applied to algorithmic trading?

Can social media sites, like Twitter, be used to analyze financial markets for algorithmic trading? How much research has been done on this topic?
2k views

### Why hold options when you can dynamically replicate their payoff?

When holding vanilla options, you can cancel out, theoretically, all risk with dynamic (delta) hedging. Then you earn the "risk free rate of return". Why would you make such a portfolio when you can ...
3k views

### Skew arbitrage: How can you realize the skewness of the underlying?

It's not clear to me how to realize skewness. In other words, how do you implement skew arbitrage? There seems to be no well-known recipe like in volatility arbitrage. Volatility arbitrage (or ...
832 views

### Are there ways to measure the risk aversion of a representative investor, based on publicly available market data?

Are there ways to measure the risk aversion of a representative investor, based on publicly available market data? Public available data could include asset price, volume, and flow data, and may be ...
3k views

### Free paper trading site with an API

I've got a quanitative trading model I want to test out in the real stock market. Right now, I'm writing some code to pull "live" quotes from yahoo, feed them to my model, and keep track of the ...
974 views

### How to execute a large futures order?

I am currently trading futures products on some contracts that have low volumes. More accurately, the volumes of working orders in the book are fairly light. I am trying to execute a relatively large ...
1k views

### Is there a way to estimate (predict) the half life of a quantitative trading system?

Usually even good performing quant trading strategies work for a while and then return start to shrink. I see two reasons for that which would probably give rise to different analysis: The Strategy ...
10k views

### Is the Interactive Brokers API suitable for hft?

By hft here I mean anything with holding period less than 5-10mins... Any empirical/anecdotal evidence of using it successfully on even higher frequencies?
13k views

### How to annualize Sharpe Ratio?

I have a basic question about annualized Sharpe Ratio Calculation: if I know the daily return of my portfolio, the thing I need to do is multiply the Sharpe Ratio by $\sqrt{252}$ to have it ...