# All Questions

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### Does mean-variance portfolio optimization provide a real edge to those who use it?

Mean-variance optimization (MVO) is a 50+ year concept, and perhaps the first seminal idea of quantitative finance. Still, as far as I know, less than 25% of AUM in the US is quantitatively managed. ...
13k views

### Cross Currency Swap Pricing in nowadays environment

Multicurve setting has now become the new paradigm for vanilla swap valuation. For the record I give here (without getting into too much details) the methodoloy for pricing Euribor3M swaps in this ...
12k 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: ...
2k 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 ...
2k views

### Why isn't the Nelson-Siegel model arbitrage-free?

Assume $X_t$ is a multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, i.e. $$dX_t=\sigma dB_t-AX_tdt$$ and the spot interest rate evolves by the following equation: $$r_t=a+b\cdot X_t.$$ After solving for $X_t$ ...
3k 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) ...
916 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 ...
44k views

### Strategy of Renaissance Technologies Medallion fund: Holy Grail or next Madoff?

Renaissance Technologies Medallion fund is one of the most successful hedge funds - ever! Yet it is very secretive. Do you have information on the strategy used that is not yet mentioned in the ...
16k views

### Is Scala used in trading systems

I'm curious about high performance computing and consider algo/program trading as an interesting source of information about what are performant technologies that are used to trade the markets. Is ...
3k 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 ...
4k 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 ...
347 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 ...
5k views

### Quantitative Math required for Market-making?

I understand there is an awful lot of Quantitative Math required for statistical arbitrage/algorithmic trading. However, would someone "in the know" be able to tell me whether there is less ...
12k views

### Why is GARCH(1,1) so popular, especially in academia?

What makes GARCH(1,1) so prevalent in modeling volatility, especially in academia? What does this model offer that makes it significantly better than the others?
2k 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 meta-...
17k views

### What is the “delta” option quoting convention about?

At my work I often see option prices or vols quoted against deltas rather than against strikes. For example for March 2013 Zinc options I might see 5 quotes available for deltas as follows: ...
7k views

I am starting to do Algorithmic trading in cryptocurrencies using Python libraries. Most exchanges have RESTful API that make it easy to write you own code and get started. However, I would like to ...
3k views

### Why are options trades supposed to be delta-neutral?

I'm reading Natenberg's book, and he says that all options trades should be delta neutral. I understand that this prevents small changes in the underlying price from changing the price of the option, ...
7k views

### Volatility pumping in practice

The fascinating thing about volatility pumping (or optimal growth portfolio, see e.g. here) is that here volatility is not the same as risk, rather it represents opportunity. Additionally it is a ...
8k views

### data on historical stock price of bankrupt companies

does anybody know a site where I can download historical data on stocks including companies that have gone bankrupt such as lehman brothers? it appears that bankrupt companies no longer appear in the ...
3k 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 ...
4k views

### Is there a popular curve fitting formula of options skew vs strike price or vs Delta?

I was trying to build a options trading/optimization system. But it often gets more inaccurate as it scans through the far from ATM options because, you know, options skews. That is because I did ...
15k views

### Discrete returns versus log returns of assets

There have been similar posts here already but nevertheless I find the question worth posting: why do some people claim that log returns of assets are more suitable for statistics than discrete ...
9k 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 ...
2k 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 ...
3k 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 ...
537 views

### What is the trickiest thing to get right in Rates Quant recently (2019)?

What are the biggest challenges for Rates Quants in 2019? Most quants have been through a lot over the past years-shifting their SABR models in JPY swaptions, fixing the FVA models for negative rates, ...
2k views

### Which interest rate model for which product

Given the multitude of existing interest rate models (ranging from simple to very complex) it would be interesting to know when the additional complexity actually makes sense. The models I have in ...
2k views

### Portfolio optimization with monte carlo sampling from predictive distribution

Let's say we have a predictive distribution of expected returns for N assets. The distribution is not normal. We can interpret the dispersion in the distribution as reflection of our uncertainty (or ...
48k views

4k views

### statistical arbitrage option overlay strategies / volatility trading

Here's an interesting trading puzzle that I would love to get the community's input on. Let's say there exists an alpha signal that does a good job of sorting equities expected excess returns over ...
938 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 "...
11k views

### Why does implied volatility show an inverse relation with strike price when examining option chains?

When looking at option chains, I often notice that the (broker calculated) implied volatility has an inverse relation to the strike price. This seems true both for calls and puts. As a current ...
8k views

### Book on market microstructure

Can I get some recommendations for a book on market microstructure? I'm not looking for some author's questionable methods for trading, I'm just looking for a book that provides me with facts about ...
6k 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.
7k views

### How to combine multiple trading algorithms?

Is it possible to combine different algorithms so as to improve trading performance? In particular, I have read that social media sentiment tracking, digital signal processing and neural networks all ...
3k 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 ...
7k views

### Is there any good research on support and resistance?

Could somebody advise me on where to find good literature on the justification or motivation for using support and resistance lines - and also lines of maximums and minimums. In finance, it is ...
2k 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 / ...
2k views

### George Soros models

Mr. Soros in his books talked about principles which are not used by today's financial mathematics — namely reflexivity of all actions on the market. Simply it can be given by following: ...