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Portfolio Probing

The ultimate aim of the Portfolio Probing blog is to help make fund management more effective, to make savings safer through better tools and better methods. Patrick Burns, the founder of Burns Statistics, offers a unique mix of experience in quantitative finance, statistics, computing and writing.

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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Popular posts 2012 November

Most popular posts in 2012 November The guts of a statistical factor model An easy mistake with returns A tale of two returns (posted in 2010) A practical introduction to garch modeling Discovering the quality of portfolio decisions The top 7 portfolio optimization problems The estimation of Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall The basics … Continue reading

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