Monthly Archives: December 2012

Blog year 2012 in review

Highlights of the blog over the past year. Most popular posts The posts with the most hits during the year. The top 7 portfolio optimization problems A tale of two returns (posted in 2010) A practical introduction to garch modeling A look at Bayesian statistics A comparison of some heuristic optimization methods The distribution of … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2012 week 53

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia in 2012 April) The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R

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Miles of iles

An explanation of quartiles, quintiles deciles, and boxplots. Previously “Again with variability of long-short decile tests” and its predecessor discusses using deciles but doesn’t say what they are. The *iles These are concepts that have to do with approximately equally sized groups created from sorted data. There are 4 groups with quartiles, 5 with quintiles … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2012 week 52

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia in 2012 April) The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R

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A look at historical Value at Risk

Historical Value at Risk (VaR) is very popular because it is easy and intuitive: use the empirical distribution of some specific number of past returns for the portfolio. Previously “The estimation of Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall” included an R function to estimate historical VaR. Generating portfolios A useful tool to explore risk models … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2012 week 51

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia in 2012 April) The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R

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garch and the Algorithmic Trading Conference

The Imperial College Algorithmic Trading Conference was Saturday. Talks Massoud Mussavian Massoud gave a great talk on “Algo Evolution”.  It started with a historical review of how trading used to be done “by hand”.  It culminated in a phylogenetic tree of trading algorithms.  There was an herbivore branch and a carnivore branch. Robert Macrae Robert … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2012 week 50

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia in 2012 April) The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R

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Again with variability of long-short decile tests

A simpler approach to producing the variability. Previously The post “Variability in long-short decile strategy tests” proposed a way of assessing the variability of strategy tests in which a long-short portfolio is created by equally weighting the top and bottom deciles. Improved idea Joe Mezrich suggests maintaining equal weights but bootstrapping the assets within the … Continue reading

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Variability in long-short decile strategy tests

How to capture return variability when testing strategies with long-short deciles. Traditional practice Question: Does variable X have predictive power for our universe of assets? A common scheme of quants to answer the question is to form a series of portfolios over time.  The portfolio at each time point: is long the equal weighting of … Continue reading

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