Author Archives: Pat

High frequency trading and the volume clock

A pictorial summary of “The Volume Clock: Insights into the High Frequency Paradigm” by David Easley, Marcos M. Lopez de Prado and Maureen O’Hara. “HFT” means “high-frequency trading/trader”, “LFT” means “low-frequency trading/trader”. Legend holds that Nathan Mayer Rothschild used racing pigeons to front run his competitors and trade on the news of Napoleon’s defeat at … Continue reading

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Cross sectional spread of stock returns

A look at a simplistic measure of stock-picking opportunity. Motivation The interquartile range (the spread of the middle half of the data) has recently been added to the market portrait plots.  Putting those numbers into historical context was the original impulse. However, this led to thinking about change in stock-picking opportunity over time. Data Daily … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2012 week 25

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R Subscribe to the Portfolio Probe blog by Email

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Smoothing the market for alpha

How to get money to alpha, and vice versa. The problem Let’s focus on two groups: People who have money and want alpha People who have alpha and want money When there is a cross between those two groups, there is happiness. Identifying Group 1 is easy.  Identifying people who want money is not difficult … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2012 week 24

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R Subscribe to the Portfolio Probe blog by Email

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Variability in maximum drawdown

Maximum drawdown is blazingly variable. Psychology Probably the most salient feature that an investor notices is the amount lost since the peak: that is, the maximum drawdown. Just because drawdown is noticeable doesn’t mean it is best to notice. Statistics The paper “About the statistics of the maximum drawdown in financial time series” explores drawdown … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2012 week 23

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R Subscribe to the Portfolio Probe blog by Email

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Popular posts 2012 May

Most popular posts in 2012 May Portfolio Diversity Random portfolios: 6 steps to a better fund management industry Cross-sectional skewness and kurtosis: stocks and portfolios A tale of two returns (posted in 2010) Asset correlations with minimum variance portfolios The top 7 portfolio optimization problems The quality of variance matrix estimation Correlations and positive-definiteness Exponential … Continue reading

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Inferno-ish R

CambR was nice enough to invite Markus Gesmann and me to speak at their event on Tuesday. My talk was Inferno-ish R. See also The R Inferno. Epilogue Subscribe to the Portfolio Probe blog by Email

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Jackknifing portfolio decision returns

A look at return variability for portfolio changes. The problem Suppose we make some change to our portfolio.  At a later date we can see if that change was good or bad for the portfolio return.  Say, for instance, that it helped by 16 basis points.  How do we properly account for variability in that … Continue reading

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