The ETFReplay.com Portfolio holdings have been updated for October 2015.  I previously detailed here and here how an investor can use ETFReplay.com to screen for best performing ETFs based on momentum and volatility. The portfolio begins with a static basket of 14 ETFs. These 14 ETFs are ranked by 6 month total returns (weighted 40%), 3 month total returns (weighted 30%), and 3 month … Continue reading October Update - ETFReplay.com Portfolio →

...evidence from simple tests does not support a belief that consumer credit is a useful indicator of future stock market behavior. There is some support for a belief that bull (bear) stock markets predict future credit expansions (contractions) over many months.

The Ivy Portfolio spreadsheet track the 10 month moving average signals for two portfolios listed in Mebane Faber’s book The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets. Faber discusses 5, 10, and 20 security portfolios that have trading signals based on long-term moving averages. The Ivy Portfolio spreadsheet tracks both the 5 and 10 … Continue reading Ivy Portfolio October Update →

Robert Carver introduces his 2015 book, Systematic Trading: A Unique New Method for Designing Trading and Investing Systems, by stating that: “I don’t believe there is any magic system that will automatically make you huge profits, and you should be wary of anyone who says otherwise, especially if they want to sell it to you. Instead, success in systematic More

What drives the profitability of algorithmic long-short statistical arbitrage trading (such as pairs trading) of liquid U.S. stocks? In their September 2015 paper entitled “Performance v. Turnover: A Story by 4,000 Alphas”, Zura Kakushadze and Igor Tulchinsky examine portfolio turnover and portfolio volatility as potential net return drivers for such trading. Their data source is 4,002 randomly More

After publishing our Two Centuries of Momentum article last week, we received a number of requests for our thoughts on the recent underperformance of multi-asset, relative strength portfolios Now, we tend to fall more on the trend following side of momentum.  So we wanted to spend some time talking about the difference between relative strength and trend following. Hopefully, in doing so, we can also shed some light on expected performance differences between the strategies as well as against a

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2015 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading →

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 9/21/15 through 9/25/15. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list. More

Is an art collection a good investment? In the August 2015 version of their paper entitled “Art as an Asset and Keynes the Collector”, David Chambers, Elroy Dimson and Christophe Spaenjers study the performance of an actual buy-and-hold art portfolio, the collection of economist John Maynard Keynes. “Keynes purchased artworks through various channels between 1917 and 1945, More

What are the principal themes of research on hedge funds published in top journals over the past decade? In their August 2015 paper entitled “Hedge Funds: A Survey of the Academic Literature”, Vikas Agarwal, Kevin Mullally and Narayan Naik summarize 121 papers on hedge funds and commodity trading advisors from four leading finance journals. They focus on the More

Are there exploitable size and momentum effects among international stocks? In their August 2015 paper entitled “Size and Momentum Profitability in International Stock Markets”, Peter Schmidt, Urs Von Arx, Andreas Schrimpf, Alexander Wagner and Andreas Ziegler examine the size effect and the interplay between size and momentum strategies via long-short stock portfolios in 23 countries. They measure stock size as More

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2015 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading →

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 9/14/15 through 9/18/15. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list. More

Does simple technical analysis based on moving averages work on high-frequency spot gold and silver trading? In their August 2015 paper entitled “Does Technical Analysis Beat the Market? – Evidence from High Frequency Trading in Gold and Silver”, Andrew Urquhart, Jonathan Batten, Brian Lucey, Frank McGroarty and Maurice Peat examine the profitability of 5-minute moving average technical analysis in the gold and More

I have been a big fan of options trader and author Euan Sinclair for a long time. I have cited his highly readable and influential book Option Trading in my own work, and it is always within easy reach from my desk. His more recent book Volatility Trading is another must-read. I ran into him at the Chicago Trading Show a few months ago where he was a panelist on volatility trading, and he graciously agreed to be interviewed by me.What is your educational background, and how did you sta

For several weeks the popular financial has been building a sense of drama in advance of today's Fed announcement: Rate hike? No rate hike? Hawkish tone? Dovish tone? The S&P; 500 moved cautiously during the morning with an absence of volatility. The index drifted higher to the 2 PM news of no hike. And of course we saw a typical price head fake in both directions followed by a spike to the 1.28% intraday high, which was then followed by a swift drop to the -0.43% intraday low. The index then tri

Does a stock momentum strategy selecting only persistent winners and losers work better than a conventional strategy that includes one-month wonders? In their August 2015 paper entitled “Persistency of the Momentum Effect: The Role of Consistent Winners and Losers”, Hong-Yi Chen, Pin-Huang Chou and Chia-Hsun Hsieh examine stock momentum persistence as a condition for momentum portfolio construction. They define the momentum More

Are readily available crowdsourced firm earnings estimates and stock sentiment measurements exploitable? In the September 2015 revision of their paper entitled “Tweet Sentiments and Crowd-Sourced Earnings Estimates as Valuable Sources of Information Around Earnings Releases”, Jim Kyung-Soo Liew,  Shenghan Guo and Tongli Zhang investigate whether earnings estimates from Estimize and sentiment measurements from iSentium usefully predict stock behavior after earnings announcements. Esti

The following enhancements were made in version 2.10 of the ATS Dakota 3 Trading Strategy Signal Generators: Modified the rules for entering positions for the trading strategies based on oscillators. When Counter Indicator is set to True and the oscillator… Continue Reading →

Do the hopes and fears of elections in the U.S. affect the “normal” seasonal variation in monthly stock market returns? To check, we compare average returns and volatilities (standard deviations of returns) by calendar month for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) during years with and without quadrennial U.S. presidential elections and biennial congressional elections. More

Below is a list of investment articles I am reading this week: Alpha Architect: Factor Models Can Only Tell You So Much The Case for Active Management…from Vanguard… A Wealth of Common Sense: In Defense of Risk Parity (Or Any Long-Term Strategy) How Much Diversification is Necessary? 6 Reasons For David Swensen’s Success at Yale … Continue reading Weekly Investment Articles →

Warren Buffet has been quoted many times as saying, “If I don’t understand it, I don’t invest in it, no matter how attractive it may appear.” I love that quote for a number of reasons, but I think it’s a great advice for system traders as well. We (myself included) have a tendency to get hypnotized by really pretty equity curves and big profit factors, but if you have no idea how those two things are being achieved, you’re on shaky ground to say the least. I’m really big on keeping things

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2015 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading →

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 9/8/15 through 9/11/15. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list. More

Scott’s Investments provides a free “Dual ETF Momentum” spreadsheet which was originally created in February 2013. The strategy was inspired by a paper written by Gary Antonacci and available on Optimal Momentum.  Antonacci’s book, Dual Momentum Investing: An Innovative Strategy for Higher Returns with Lower Risk, also details Dual Momentum as a total portfolio strategy. My Dual ETF Momentum spreadsheet is available here and the … Continue reading Dual ETF Momentum September Update →

How can investors best exploit research showing that low-beta (high-beta) stocks tend to outperform (underperform)? In their August 2015 paper entitled “Low-Beta Investment Strategies”, Olaf Kornz and Laura-Chloe Kuntz test 32 “zero-cost” (long-short) strategies designed to exploit the beta anomaly as applied to S&P 500 stocks. The strategies derive from three choices: (1) length of the rolling window used More

VIX mean reversion trade gets popular when the market experiences big ups and downs. You hear a lot of talks about how much money people make from trading VXX, XIV and their leveraged equivalents. However, is VIX truly mean reverting, or it seems more lucrative than it is just because people only like to talk about it when they […]

The Labor Market Conditions Index (LMCI) is a relatively recent indicator developed by Federal Reserve economists to assess changes in the labor market conditions. It is a dynamic factor model of labor market indicators, essentially a diffusion index subject to extensive revisions based on nineteen underlying indicators in nine broad categories (see the table at the bottom for details). Yesterday's release of the August data indicates expansion at 2.1. Positive revisions were made to the previou

Are expert technicians or fundamentalists better forecasters of short-term and intermediate-term asset returns? In the August 2015 version of their paper entitled “Talking Numbers: Technical versus Fundamental Recommendations”, Doron Avramov, Guy Kaplanski and Haim Levy assess the economic value of dual technical and fundamental recommendations presented simultaneously on “Talking Numbers”, a CNBC and Yahoo joint broadcast…”featuring fundamental and technical

The High Yield Dividend Champion Portfolio is a publicly tracked stock portfolio on Scott’s Investments.  Its goal is to capture quality high yield stocks with a history of raising dividends. The screening process for this portfolio starts with the “Dividend Champions” as compiled by DRIP Investing. The list is comprised of stocks that have increased their dividend payout for … Continue reading Dividend Champion Portfolio September Update →

Do behaviors of commodity futures over the past decade require updating of beliefs based on earlier research? In their August 2015 paper entitled “Conquering Misperceptions about Commodity Futures Investing”, Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey update and interpret research on returns from a passive, continuous investment in commodity futures. They focus on: Relative contributions of price return and More

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2015 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading →

            A tactical approach based on momentum would require that investors reduce their risk recently as volatility rose and trends deteriorated. Obviously no one knows what will happen going forward (ie is this a bull market or a correction) but from a purely qualitative perspective, the economic environment warrants more caution […]

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 8/31/15 through 9/4/15. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list. More

What qualifiers can enhance the performance of a small value stock strategy? In their August 2015 paper entitled “Leveraged Small Value Equities”, Brian Chingono and Daniel Rasmussen devise and test a strategy to refine a portfolio of small capitalization value stocks of firms that with relatively high financial leverage. Specifically, their target universe at the end of each year More

What indicator works best to mitigate stock momentum strategy crashes? In his March 2015 paper entitled “Momentum Crash Management”, Mahdi Heidari compares performances of seven indicators for avoiding conventional stock momentum strategy crashes: (1) prior-month market return; (2) change in prior-month market return: (3) market volatility (standard deviation of 52 weekly returns); (4) dispersion (variance) of daily returns More

After a hiatus of almost a year (the October 2014 pullback, to be exact), I have reprised the VIX and More Fear Poll in an attempt to get some insight into which issues have been responsible for bring fear back into the investing equation and in so triggering the highest VIX spike (53.29) outside of the 2008-09 financial crisis and the #5 and #6 one-day VIX spikes ever on consecutive days. In the chart below, I have summarized the top ten responses from almost 400 voters, covering 40 countries

Which of the following makes you most fearful, anxious or uncertain about the stock market?

The home page and “Value Strategy” now show preliminary asset class ETF value strategy positions for September 2015. There may be small shifts in allocations based on final data, but the “Best Value” selection is unlikely to change.

Does combining the outputs of many methods of estimating the equity risk premium (ERP) produce a useful result? In their February 2015 paper entitled “The Equity Risk Premium: A Review of Models”, Fernando Duarte and Carlo Rosa estimate ERP via principal component analysis of 20 models, which they assign to five categories: (1) predictors based solely on historical average return; (2) dividend More

The ETFReplay.com Portfolio holdings have been updated for September 2015.  I previously detailed here and here how an investor can use ETFReplay.com to screen for best performing ETFs based on momentum and volatility. The portfolio begins with a static basket of 14 ETFs. These 14 ETFs are ranked by 6 month total returns (weighted 40%), 3 month total returns (weighted 30%), and 3 month … Continue reading ETFReplay.com Portfolio September Update →

The Ivy Portfolio spreadsheet track the 10 month moving average signals for two portfolios listed in Mebane Faber’s book The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets. Faber discusses 5, 10, and 20 security portfolios that have trading signals based on long-term moving averages. The Ivy Portfolio spreadsheet tracks both the 5 and 10 … Continue reading Ivy Portfolio September Update →

A reader proposed: “I recently found something interesting while analyzing the ratio of the equal-weighted S&P 500 Index to its market capitalization-weighted counterpart. Whenever this ratio declines (out of an uptrend), the market crashes (July 2007, September-October 2008, July 2011). Also, when this ratio starts rising, the recovery commences (April 2009). The indicator seems to More

This is the second article in a two-part series where I discuss the top three pitfalls when backtesting Stock & ETF trading systems. In the first article, The Top Three Pitfalls of Stock and ETF System Development, I highlighted the top three issues system developers face. In this article, I’m going to show you how I fixed this problem to give me precise and accurate historical backtested results. As many of you know, I designed the ETF trading strategies for Tuttle Tactical Management

Global Sigma Group, a volatility fund with almost 6 years track record in S&P options is preparing a new offering called BondVol, with focus on Treasuries vol. New information, although quite sparse, is available on their website, as well as this SEC filing.The (unconfirmed) rumor is that the flagship Global Sigma Plus Program is suffering their largest drawdown to date, although my understanding is that it is significant, but within  reason. I know a many people in volatility

What has happened in the past when the SPY opens 3.5% or more down?I ran the numbers and have some code for doing it yourself. I found that there's typically a profitable day ahead, and even if not profitable, the day tends to have enough upside (Open to High) to be of great interest.  Here is a link to the code I used to calculate these results. You will want to grab the DataManager from Github to easily populate data for the study.Check out the topic on the new forum if you have any

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2015 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading →

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 8/24/15 through 8/28/15. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list. More

Is implied volatility of implied volatility, interpretable as a measure of changes in investor fear level, a useful indicator of future stock market returns or VIX futures returns? To investigate, we examine relationships between the CBOE VVIX Index, a measure of the expected volatility of the 30-day forward level of the S&P 500 Implied Volatility Index (VIX) derived More