Trading Order Out of Chaos
In the previous article we set out to cover a new asset class: Bond investments. We saw how by including bonds together with stocks we could improve on our portfolio performance. Is this mixture still good given that we are now shifting in the interest rate cycle to a Bond Bear Market? In this article we […]
Of all things on this planet?! Aren’t they boring? Not explosive enough? Isn’t this stuff what old people invest in? Also, aren’t they supposed to start to sell-off? And how do you get your hands on these over the counter instruments. In the first article of this series on Creating Profitable Trading Strategies we started […]
In previous articles I’ve written about the idea of Kelly betting or using leverage to really boost the growth of your returns. I’ve also shown how different fundamental components work together to create an FX Benchmark index. This article is slightly different. I want to keep it KISS: “Keep It Simple Stupid.” I will show […]
PBOC fixings have become a fixture (at least for the last couple of days). With the big sell-off in the CSI China is trying to inject liquidity into the market and doing so in different ways. For the FX market it’s been a weakening of the reference rate. Here are the rates over the last couple of days (versus the USD):Of course the market cottoned on to the PBOC’s desperation, and the rout continued. The effect on the Asian time-zone currencies was worth noting. We already covere…
This indicator will average the bid / ask spread over the last N ticks. The purpose is to be able to monitor the behavior of the currency pair during fast markets, such as occur before and during news announcements. It’s useful for indicating times of increased danger, and can be used as a possible flag to square positions. The parameters are:
- MA: the number of ticks to average the bid/ask spread over. The default is set to 30 ticks
- showTickCount: a boolean flag, which when set t…
The London Breakout Strategy falls under the category of Open Range Breakout as developed by Toby Crabel. In this article we’ll look at some results with regards to this strategy, as well different ways of trading it. Let’s start out with the notion of Open Range Breakout. The key concept behind this strategy is that the range set at the start of the day sets a neutral zone for the rest of the day. If price moves either side of this range it is a strong indication that price will wa…
This week’s article is more tongue in cheek: do natural phenomena affect the markets? What we’ll be particularly looking at are the full moon, new moon, and solar eclipses, especially since we had one on the 9th March this year. Back in 2005 I wrote a similar article at Barclays Capital for the weekly quant newsletter we sent out to clients. It was a summer lull, and it seemed like a swell idea. The results back then indicated that it was the New Moon rather than the Full Moon that really imp…
In this week’s article I cover the right approach to benchmarking your performance using the standard risk measures out there. In particular we’ll start out by outlining how the Sharpe Ratio relates to the usual performance measures such as Win/Loss ration or Return/Maximum Draw-Down ratios. This will allow you to see if you are on track or not, and adjust your trading accordingly. The purpose is to put risk measurement into context and relate your trading statistics to optimal wealth accum…