100-Years of the United States Dollar Factor

Finding high-quality data with a long history can be challenging. We have already examined How To Extend Historical Daily Bond Data To 100 years, How To Extend Daily Commodities Data To 100 years, and How To Build a Multi-Asset Trend-Following Strategy With a 100-year Daily History. Following the theme of our previous articles, we decided to extend historical data of a new factor, the Dollar Factor. This article explains how to combine multiple data sources to create a 100-year daily data history for the Dollar Factor (the value of the United States Dollar relative to its most important trading partners’ currencies), introduces data sources, and explains the methodology.

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ETFs: What’s Better? Full Replication vs. Representative Sampling?

ETFs employ two fundamentally distinct methods to replicate their underlying benchmark index. The more conventional method, physical replication, involves holding all constituent securities (full replication) or a representative sample (representative sampling) of the benchmark index. In contrast, the synthetic replication achieves the benchmark return by entering into a total return swap or another derivative contract with a counterparty, typically a large investment bank. As we have previously discussed, there is no significant difference in the tracking ability between the physical and synthetic ETFs in the long term. And while our article compares physical and synthetic ETFs, it does not address the differences between the full replication ETFs and sampling ETFs. Therefore, one may ask a question: “When selecting a physically replicated ETF, which replication method is better, full replication or representative sampling?”

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The Importance of Factor Construction Choices

Choosing the correct portfolio-construction techniques is very important. The new paper that is written by Amar Soebhag, Bart van Vliet, and Patrick Verwijmeren explores the various ways in which different design choices in portfolio construction can, either intentionally or unintentionally, influence and distort the statistical results of a market factor’s research. Their takeaway is that seemingly small differences in design can significantly impact the resultant portfolio’s performance.

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Takeover Factor Explains the Size Effect

The size effect assumes a negative relationship between average stock returns and firm size. In other words, it states that low capitalization stocks outperform stocks with large capitalization. Although generally accepted, the size effect keeps being challenged. Researchers have been asking how important the firm size characteristic actually is, and whether it is possible to replace the traditional size factor of Fama and French asset pricing model (1993) with more accurate factor. Recently, one potential challenger has emerged – so-called takeover factor, employed by Easterwood et al. (2022). In their study, they work on the assumption that small firms are often targets of takeovers, which gives us a different perspective on merger and acquisition news in regards to size effect. Their results show that M&A component of average returns explains the size premium entirely.

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Quantpedia Introduces 3rd Party Factors

Every year, Quantpedia’s team investigates thousands of academic research papers to bring you the most promising ideas from the academic world. We read papers, identify ideas and backtest them to build our unique database. As a result, we have already identified hundreds of factors and built tools to help you orient better in the broad universe of trading strategies and systematic investment factors.

And now, we are opening the possibility to all external researchers, quants, and portfolio managers to contribute to Quantpedia.

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Skewness/Lottery Trading Strategy in Cryptocurrencies

A recent spring 2022 crisis in the cryptocurrency market emphasized the importance of market-neutral crypto trading strategies. It’s not enough just to HODL crypto market and hope for the everlasting bull market. Therefore, we continue our series of research articles about the cryptocurrency market and offer an analysis of the skewness anomaly. So after our description of the skewness effect in commodities, an article about the multi-asset skewness strategy, and observation of the skewness/lottery effect in ETFs, we have one more asset class, where we can find lottery/skewness anomaly – in cryptocurrencies.

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