# All Questions

339 views

### How to estimate the covariance of an index with a basket of stocks?

What would be an ideal way to estimate the covariance of an index with a basket of stocks? For example, should I use one-tail ANOVA test or an individual stock & index F-test?
620 views

### How to compute momentum from equity time series?

Let's say I have time series of stock prices for many stocks. What's the best way to sort the stocks based on which have been going up/stayed the same relative to others? Can this be done with a ...
324 views

### Applying models with normality assumption on tick data?

Beginner question. Having read a couple of papers and book chapters on high-frequency data forecasting, I'm surprised (and confused) that the same time series techniques can be applied to ...
730 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 ...
110 views

### Getting the actual distribution of a stock price at time T using implied volatility [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: How to derive the implied probability distribution from B-S volatilities? Let's assume a stock price S, with volatility $\sigma$ constant, no dividend, and risk free ...
558 views

### Why does the following data fail my cointegration test?

I have some closing price data for two Australian banks which track each other very closely. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12337149/stat/CBA.csv http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12337149/stat/WBC.csv Code from ...
586 views

### How to forecast expected volatility from high-frequency equity panel data?

I'm wading through the vast sea of literature on realized volatility estimation and expected volatility forecasting (see, e.g. Realized Volatility by Andersen and Benzoni, which cites 120 other ...
219 views

### How can one determine approximately what percentage of options trades are buyer-initiated vs. seller-initiated?

How can one determine approximately what percentage of options trades are buyer-initiated vs. seller-initiated? What measures of order flow are available specifically for options, preferably for ...
264 views

207 views

### Where can you find data on non-trading stocks?

My data source for end of day prices only gives the prices of the trades during the day. If a stock stops trading/goes out/moves to another exchange|changes symbol. I never hear about this. My ...
357 views

### How to perform basic integrations with the Ito integral?

From the text book Quantitative Finance for Physicists: An Introduction (Academic Press Advanced Finance) I have this excercise: Prove that  ...
820 views

### How to optimally allocate capital among trading strategies?

I'm trying to find an optimal way to allocate capital among trading strategies. "Quantitative Trading" by Ernie Chan claims on page 97 that the optimal fraction of capital to allocate to a given ...
152 views

### How do earnings estimates respond to changes in underlying fundamentals and economic conditions?

Sell-side analysts' earnings estimates for individual companies, typically reported by I/B/E/S, are a key ingredient to many quantitative models. However, revisions to analyst estimates tend to lag ...
1k views

### Is my trading strategy search methodology sound?

I'm building an algorithmic trading business. I'd be grateful for informed comments and opinions on my trading strategy search methodology. Goal Develop (profitable!) fully automated intra-day ...
420 views

### Reference on Markov chain Monte Carlo method for option pricing?

I have to implement option pricing in c++ using Markov chain Monte Carlo. Is there some paper which describes this in detail so that I can learn from there and implement?
397 views

### How to compute modified-CVaR in the PerformanceAnalytics package?

My objective is to measure the modified-CVAR for a portfolio given its weights and matrix of security returns. Luckily the wonderful package PerformanceAnalytics has an ES() function that does just ...
841 views

### How to get started in quant finance? [closed]

I am a programmer and I have no finance background. I am looking for advice as to how to get started in the quant finance industry. My goal would be to have solid understanding about the industry and ...
366 views

### How to Calculate Risk of Ruin [closed]

I'm reading a book titled "A Trader's Money Management System" and it discusses risk of ruin(ROR) tables. It says that you can have a zero probability of ROR with a payoff ratio of 2 to 1 and a win ...
362 views

### What should be considered when selecting a windowing function when smoothing a time series?

If one wants to smooth a time series using a window function such as Hanning, Hamming, Blackman etc. what are the considerations for favouring any one window over another?
820 views

### What is the average Sharpe ratio of volatility arbitrage funds?

Where can I get data on performance metrics for volatility arbitrage funds? I am trying to compare the Sharpe ratio of my strategy to those of the major players.
182 views

### What do we really mean by put-call ratio and how should it be expressed?

I need to calculate the put-call ratio for an American option. But I'm a complete naïf: I don't know how. I think I'd use the put open interest and the call open interest. I can imagine two ways to ...
411 views

### What is a reasonable upper bound on the performance of a daily trading strategy?

I am backtesting an equity trading strategy which trades only once per day. Is there a general rule of thumb for the reasonable upper bound on the rate of return of such a strategy? For example, a ...
732 views

### How to build a regime-switching model which knows its own limits?

In recent months I've come to the conclusion that there are not only certain regimes in the markets (like bear or bull) but phases where all models fail because we are in uncharted territory. The ...
3k views

### How to interpret the eigenmatrix from a Johansen cointegration test?

I ran a Johansen cointegration test on 3 instruments, A B and C. The results that I got are: R<=x | Test Stat | 90% | 95% | 99% r=0 --> 36.7 | 18.9 | 21.1 | 25.8 r=1 --> ...
89 views

### How Would You Categorize A Cap or Spread On A Monthly Sum Option?

I'm just trying to determine the appropriate naming convention for a category that holds cap or spread, or in other words, what category can I put cap and spread (in this context) into? Are they ...
371 views

### What techniques are used for testing order book implementations?

I am finishing the implementation of a limit order book for modeling NASDAQ. The order book works off of the ITCH feed. My question is what techniques are typically used for testing order books. I am ...
1k views

### At what point does someone using technical analysis become a Quant?

Sorry if the question sounds rough. It's not my intention to devaluate something I've not yet understood like Quantitative Finance. So to keep it simple: is Quantitative Finance a science, like ...
383 views

383 views

### Is there any research on applying state-space or dynamic linear models to forecasting equity risk premia?

Is there any research on applying state-space or dynamic linear models to forecasting equity risk premia on a security-by-security basis with a medium term horizon (say 3 month to 12 months horizon)? ...
273 views

### penalizing negative skewness by linking $U(\mu)$ and $U(\Sigma)$

Consider $U_1(\mu,\Sigma)$ and $U_2(\mu,\Sigma)$, where $U_1(\mu, \cdot) = U_2(\mu, \cdot)$, $U_1(\cdot, \Sigma) = U_2(\cdot, \Sigma)$ such that \begin{equation*} arg\inf\limits_{\mu \in U_1(\mu, ...
168 views

### How to quantify the impact of management cost on return?

Suppose funds X and Y are the same but X has 0.25% higher management cost. Suppose we are analyzing a 2 year interval. The simple models with discrete/continuous interval -assumptions are not really ...
1k views

### How to estimate probability of default from bond prices?

How do you use bond prices/yields to infer probabilities of default? I would think of it as follows: Create a relationship between default free (e.g., Germany) and defaultable (e.g., Greece) bond ...
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 $\sqrt{(days/252)}$ $*volatility*mean*$ $\log(mean)$. ...
2k views

I am looking for all kinds of research concerning option trading strategies. With that I mean papers that publish results on different option trading strategies properly backtested with real-world ...
712 views

### What tools are used to numerically solve differential equations in Quantitative Finance?

There are a lot of Quantitative Finance models (e.g. Black-Scholes) which are formulated in terms of partial differential equations. What is a standard approach in Quantitative Finance to solve these ...
564 views

### How do you distinguish “significant” moves from noise?

How do you distinguish between losses that are within the normal range for day-to-day shifts and situations with a real potential for loss? The specific application I have in mind is pattern ...
1k views

### How to incorporate technical indicators into neural networks?

I plan to develop a neural network to trade commodities futures, but while messing around with some code, a question came up. If I understand correctly, people use various technical indicators with ...
229 views

### How to build the short end of a zero coupon curve for non-core Eurozone countries?

I am in the process of building zero coupon curves for some countries in the Eurozone. I have the following data sets: Euribor and EONIA Swap rates Bond price and yields The bond prices (and thus ...
191 views

### Is it better to grade hedging strategies based on the sum of absolute or squared hedging errors?

Let's say I have one strategy that has a hedging error of: 2, 2, -2, -2 Let's say I have another strategy that has a hedging error of .5, .5, 3, 3 Would it be a better idea to grade the hedging ...
1k views

### How do I reproduce the cross-sectional regression in “Intraday Patterns in the Cross-section of Stock Returns”?

Recently I was trying to reproduce the results of "Intraday Patterns in the Cross-section of Stock Returns". The authors used cross-sectional regression to determine which intraday lags have ...
619 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 ...
554 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 ...
1k views

### Why does the VIX index have *any* correlation to the market?

It appears that the log 'returns' of the VIX index have a (negative) correlation to the log 'returns' of e.g. the S&P 500 index. The r-squared is on the order of 0.7. I thought VIX was supposed to ...