# Tag Info

35

I can only talk about quantitative trading. As a rule of thumb, the lower frequency you work in, the more econometrics is important, whereas for a higher frequency, the more econometrics becomes useless. (I would still recommend a top econometrician for HFT since they have what it takes to succeed, it's just the models aren't out-of-the-box applicable.) But ...

28

It's an interesting question. I particularly agree with the $\mathbb{Q}-\mathbb{P}$ dichotomy mentioned by many. I would add to the other answers that, come to think of it, the Black-Scholes postulated Geometric Brownian Motion could be interpreted as an AR(1) process on the logarithm of the stock price as you discretise the SDE from which it is a solution,...

16

I think you need to differentiate between Q-quants vs P-quants. The former might not use Econometrics, but P-quants use them a lot.

11

Traditional econometric (time series) models are of little or no value in forecasting market prices for purposes of "making money", i.e, generating excess return over a benchmark in an asset management setting. They have some limited value in strategic and tactical asset allocation. The ineffectiveness of time-series modeling in asset management stems ...

11

Define excess return $r^x_{it} = r_{it} - r^f_{t}$ as the return $i$ minus the risk free rate, and $f_{jt}$ similarly denotes the excess return of factor $j$ at time $t$. Let's say we have some factor model of returns where: $$r^x_{it} = \alpha_i + \sum_j \beta_{i,j} f_{jt} + \epsilon_{it}$$ F-test / GRS Test If we assume the error terms $\epsilon_{it}$ ...

10

There is a lot of ways to understand why stationarity allows to apply usual time series analysis. Here is one more. Very often, the theoretical justification of what you do in time series need to be able to identify the mean formula and the expectation: $$\frac{1}{N}\sum_{n=1}^N X_n \underset{N\rightarrow +\infty}{\longrightarrow} \mathbb{E} X,$$ where the ...

10

A more apples to apples comparison would be between (i) Fama-Macbeth procedure and (2) clustering standard-errors by date. Adding fixed-effects is somewhat different. Problem: cross-sectional correlation causes naively computed standard errors to be understated Let $r_{it}$ denote the return of firm $i$ in month $t$. An important statistical issue is that ...

9

The best paper is probably Relative Volume as a Doubly Stochastic Binomial Point Process - James Mcculloch. In this paper the volume is modelled via a Point Process, and theoretical laws are derived (with confident intervals, etc). And we put elements about this in Market Microstructure in Practice, Chap 2.1. Volume curves are analyzed, not only during the ...

9

The bias comes from the paper Stambaugh (1999) and has nothing to do with small sample bias. It has to do with point (1) below. The argument goes as follows: Typical lagged explanatory variables for stock-return regressions are correlated with contemporaneous stock returns This contemporaneous correlation biases forecasting regressions First review OLS ...

8

Glad you've asked :) Technically speaking, in factor model $\alpha$ stays for return or risk premia, which asset pays when all factor returns are zero. Then, to answer question in more details, we have to specify, are we dealing in our model with return ($R_i$ for asset $i$) or with risk premia over risk free ($R_i-R_f$). In the first case, ...

8

@user2763361 has a very thorough list of useful econometric topics for quantitative finance. I would add missing, mixed frequency, and irregular data as major issues that I'm either constantly dealing with or begrudgingly ignoring. Seasonal adjustment is important too for some data (like electricity futures), though the subject is also related to his ...

7

My answer is very much in the spirit of Kiwiakos' answer. E.g. in this paper (where I am one of the coauthors) we use VMA (vector moving average) models (in the multivariate case) and AR models in the univariate case to calculate proper scaling of volatility or its contributions if there are (cross-) auto-correlations. This happens in the P world due to ...

7

Having thought about this I think the following reason is also important and wasn't mentioned so far: When you look at the inner working of this whole class of econometric models it all boils down to the following: It is possible (under some reasonable assumptions) to express any $MA(q)$ model as an $AR(\infty)$ model (and vice-versa for expressing $AR(p)$ ...

7

Without seeing your trading desk's P&L it's impossible to say whether it is predictable or not. But here are a few thoughts - There's no reason to think that it isn't predictable. In general, financial time series are hardest to predict when the represent the return stream of an investible asset. A trading desk's P&L isn't really investible, so ...

7

I will be glad to help, but let me first advise you away from working on this topic until you have an academic position. This topic has been poison for me, but I am slogging on anyways. Before you use anything I do, get permission from your academic advisor. I have an unpublished article on options pricing, and I am proposing a new branch of stochastic ...

6

The idea of skipping a month was already in Jegadeesh and Titman 1993. The key academic paper in this area. Jegadeesh himself (without Titman) discovered a 1-month return REVERSAL effect in 1990, so it makes sense that he would take out 1 month in calculating returns in his later (1993) study. He already knew what happens to stocks that are up a lot ...

6

No, you cannot interpret the average return for the factor as the risk premium. The second stage regression is equivalent to building a set of portfolios that have no net investment, a unit exposure to one factor and 0 exposure to all others. These unit exposure portfolios are then used to estimate the risk premia for those factors ($\lambda_t$). In that ...

5

2) Alternative to Fama-MacBeth is Fama-French approach. Explanation of difference see, for example, here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1271935 Fama-French approach was used by Carhart (introduced momentum), Pastor-Stambaugh (introduced liquidity), Fama-French themselves (used it to build 5-factor model), and many other (elsevier or ...

5

No, a sum of two GARCH processes is generally not a GARCH process. (I am not even sure whether there exists a nontrivial special case where the opposite holds.) By GARCH I mean the classic definition of GARCH due to Bollerslev (1986), not an arbitrary variation like EGARCH, IGARCH, FIGARCH or whatever else. Let me provide an example. Take two ...

5

An AR(1), once the time series and lags are aligned and everything is set-up, is in fact a standard regression problem. Let's look, for simplicity sake, at a "standard" regression problem. I will try to draw some conclusions from there. Let's say we want to run a linear regression where we want to approximate $y$ with h_(x) = \sum_0^n \theta_i x_i = \...

4

From my point of view, dynamic models like the one developped in Relative Volume as a Doubly Stochastic Binomial Point Process - James Mcculloch to provide a dynamic forecast of the volume does not improve significantly the forecasting comparing to a static volume curve forecast using historical data (last month intraday data, and an EWMA algorithm). I've ...

4

There are tons of quant related blogs out there, some of which contain relatively sophisticated content, others less so. Have a look at the following, which aggregates blogs: MoneyScience Otherwise I could point you to bank/sell-side research. Have a look at the freely available Reuters Messenger (RM), they maintain channels where you can be permissioned ...

4

The return equation is just an econometric equation that models stock returns (or other asset returns) as a function of: (i) intercept (i.e. the average return), (ii) some independent variables/features, (iii) noise that has zero mean and time-varying variance. There are sometimes other things in the return equation too that form more advanced models. The ...

4

The key assumption is that there is no time-series correlation between the error terms. Fama-MacBeth can deal with cross-sectional correlations. See Samuel Thompson's "Simple formulas for standard errors that cluster by both firm and time" in the Journal of Financial Economics (2011) for a treatment of different regression methods for testing equity ...

4

I am a professor too and I did work with Siemens Corporate Technology which provides the quantitative technology for their copper and electricity trading (Siemens being one of the biggest players in this area in Europe). They are mainly using sophisticated neural networks. We also published a paper together, see my answer here: What types of neural networks ...

4

Just came across this thread...not sure if you already have your answer, but thought I'd give you a shout. In the energy business, we employ a range of models. You'll find the most sophisticated models on the Pricing desks, Risk Management desks and the Options trading desks. A variety of products are traded - futures, forwards and swaps. For options - in ...

4

There are a couple of issues with your example. First, for this ticker, there is a problem with the Yahoo price data for the period 2014-11-26 through 2014-12-03 in which the prices drop about 80% and then return to their trend line. This appears to be related to a stock split which Yahoo isn't handling properly and isn't real. Its causing part of your ...

4

The gold standard for time series analysis in Python is pandas. Pandas was originally developed at AQR to support their in-house research and has since been open-sourced. It has very high-performance implementations for data structures such as Series, DataFrame, and Panel. Pandas itself is very rich. Not only does it let you create time series ...

4

A nice paper by Sornette, about Dragon Kings here

4

Another way of staying "time-varying risk-premium", is saying that the risk-premium is predictable. However, that the fact that the risk-premium is predictable does not means that you can make money out of this. The best two references to understand this are: Cochrane (2008) - The dog that did not bark Goyal and Welch (2007) The first tells you what ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible