All Questions

18k 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 ...
1k views

How to estimate the probability of drawdown / ruin?

A fairly naive approach to estimate the probability of drawdown / ruin is to calculate the probabilities of all the permutations of your sample returns, keeping track of those that hit your drawdown / ...
691 views

Why is the ratio of Hi-Low range to Open-Close range close to 2?

I tried it in several symbols and timeframes with the same result: $$\frac {mean(HIGH-LOW)}{mean(|CLOSE-OPEN|)}$$ ...
2k views

What are the main categories of systematic trading strategies (e.g. momentum, mean reversion), as might be considered by an index or fund-of-fund analyst? Are there any common sub-strategies?
1k views

How can I quantitatively test the validity of momentum indicators?

I am learning about quantitative finance, and I am struck by how different it is from the techniques that make it into magazines and TV, particularly technical analysis. Specifically, if they say an ...
500 views

How to test for and how to simulate price rise/fall asymmetry in the stock market

One of the stylized facts of financial time series seems to be a fundamental asymmetry between smooth upward movements over longer periods of time followed by abrupt declines over relatively shorter ...
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 ...
3k 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.
786 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 ...
5k views

The bid-ask bounce is the bouncing of trade prices between the bid and ask sides of the market. It introduces a systematic bias to the data which can cause serious problems in analysis. What methods ...
7k views

Is there any thing out there as a substitute for KDB?

thanks a lot for your discussions on the original post. following your suggestions, let me re-phrase a bit : kdb is known for its efficiency, and such efficiency comes at a terrible price. However, ...
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 ...
1k 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 ...
475 views

Measuring Behavioral Finance Effects in Fund/Portfolio Manager Analysis

I want to know if there are some standardized measures to evaluate how irrationally human a portfolio manager is. Are there any performance measures or scorings for behavioral finance effects? How ...
1k 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 ...
3k views

Applications of Fourier theory in trading

What are fashionable applications of Fourier analysis in trading? I have heard vague ideas of applications in High Frequency Trading but can somebody provide an example, maybe a reference? Just for ...
675 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

Cleansing covariance matrices via Random matrix theory

I am exploring de-noising and cleansing of covariance matrices via Random Matrix Theory. RMT is a competitor to shrinkage methods of covariance estimation. There are various methods expressed usually ...
2k views

How can I learn about the quantitative aspects of market making in illiquid single stock options?

I would like to learn more about the possible ways of doing quantitative research regarding option market making. In particular, while the mainstream index option market may be very liquid, the ...
715 views

Duality between constant rebalanced portfolio (CRP) and corresponding derivative

One of the greatest achievements of modern option pricing theory is finding corresponding dynamical trading strategies in linear instruments with which you can replicate and by that price derivative ...
969 views

Measuring liquidity

While liquidity is one of the key figure of financial markets, It seems to be very difficult to measure. Volume is sometime used as a proxy but can sometimes be completly irrelevant. Could you point ...
557 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 ...
815 views

What is the relationship between risk aversion and preference for skewness and kurtosis in portfolio optimization?

Is there any relationship between the risk aversion coefficient in an individual's utility function (commonly used in portfolio optimization) and the preference for higher moments such as skewness and ...
2k views

What is an efficient data structure to model order book?

What is an efficient data structure to model order book of prices and quantities to ensure: constant look up iteration in order of prices retrieving best bid and ask in constant time fast quantity ...
575 views

Self-financing and Black-Scholes-Merton formula

Self-financing is an important concept in financial product replicating, normally used in pricing. I read about several ways to derive Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) formula. Seems some approaches ...
420 views

Choice of prior as a shrinkage target in portfolio construction?

There's various research showing how priors such as the minimum variance portfolio turn out to be a surprisingly effective shrinkage target in portfolio construction. The sell point of these priors ...
3k views

Option pricing before Black-Scholes

According to the Wikipedia article, Contracts similar to options are believed to have been used since ancient times. In London, puts and "refusals" (calls) first became well-known trading ...
847 views

Resources for finding scholarly research on topics in quantitative finance?

A friend and I have taken up an interest in quantitative finance, and we're pretty much starting from scratch—neither of us have backgrounds in finance, but rather electrical engineering and ...
2k views

Why do expected return models and risk models use different factors?

This is a question responding to weekly topic challenge. I happen to see an interesting question from SYMMYS by Michael Kapler. I always approached expected return and risk modeling as separate ...
2k views

Should Sharpe ratio be computed using log returns or relative returns?

I am trying to reconcile some research with some published values of 'Sharpe ratio', and would like to know the 'standard' method for computing the same: Based on daily returns? Monthly? Weekly? ...
943 views

Implementing a Fast Fourier Transform for Option Pricing

So, I'm in need of some tips regarding a small project I'm doing. My goal is an implementation of a Fast Fourier Transform algorithm (FFT) which can be applied to the pricing of options. First ...
2k views

What is the ideal ratio of in-sample length to out-of-sample length?

Suppose you are running a portfolio of quantitative strategies and that you develop a new potential strategy to be added to the mix. Assume for simplicity that the new strategy is independent of the ...
1k views

How to estimate real-world probabilities

In the world of finance, Risk-neutral pricing allow us to estimate the fair value of derivatives using the risk free rate as the expected return of the underlyings. However, the behavior of ...
1k views

What approaches are there to order handling in automated trading?

I am currently developing a commercial automated trading program in which users can write their own proprietary code and develop strategies, like in NinjaTrader, MetaTrader etc. Right now I am working ...
10k views

How to simulate stock prices with a Geometric Brownian Motion?

I want to simulate stock price paths with different stochastic processes. I started with the famous geometric brownian motion. I simulated the values with the following formula: ...
684 views

Indicators and research for stress-based investment strategies

In reference to this paper: Can risk aversion indicators anticipate ﬁnancial crises? and the investable UBS Risk Adjusted Dynamic Alpha Strategy: ...
8k views

How to fit ARMA+GARCH Model In R?

I am currently working on ARMA+GARCH model using R. I am looking out for example which explain step by step explanation for fitting this model in R. I have time series which is stationary and I am ...
615 views

How do you remove expected returns from asset allocation strategies?

The classic mean-variance optimization problem tries to minimize variance of a portfolio for a given expected return:  \underset{w}{\arg \min} \quad w^T \Sigma w \quad \text{s.t} \quad \mu^Tw \geq ...
2k views

QuantLib in industry

How much is QuantLib used in industry and how much street cred does it have?
2k views

Is there any theoretical basis for pattern-recognition strategies?

Mean-reversion and trend-following strategies have some kind of a theory behind them that explains why they might work, if implemented well. Pattern-recognition, on the other hand, seems like nothing ...
1k views

Is there a standard method for getting a continuous time series from futures data?

I would like to be able to analyse futures prices as one continuous time series, so what kinds of methods exist for combining the prices for the various delivery dates into a single time series? I am ...
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 ...
2k views

What type of analysis is appropriate for assessing the performance time-series forecasts?

When using time-series analysis to forecast some type of value, what types of error analysis are worth considering when trying to determine which models are appropriate. One of the big issues that ...
817 views

How to account for transaction costs in a simulated market environment?

I am simulating a market for my trading system. I have no ask-bid prices in my dataset and use adjusted close for both buy and sell price. To account for this I plan to use a relative transaction ...
1k views

Hedging stocks with VIX futures

It seems that VIX futures could be a great hedge for a long-only stock portfolio since they rise when stocks fall. But how many VIX futures should I buy to hedge my portfolio, and which futures ...
594 views

Minimizing Correlation

Is there a quantitative method in monitoring trades to reduce the possibility of correlated trades?
2k views

SPX options vs VIX futures trading

Forward volatility implied by SPX options, and that of VIX futures get out of line. If there existed VIX SQUARED futures they could easily be replicated (and arbitraged) with a strip of SPX options. ...
2k views

Difference between google finance and yahoo finance?

I am wondering about the huge differences of the data provider google finance and yahoo finance. I am interested in the monthly data from adidas listed on xetra. In google: ETR:ADS and in yahoo ...