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Is It Good to Be Bad? – The Quest for Understanding Sin vs. ESG Investing

November 2, 2023

What are our expectations from the ESG theme on the portfolio management level? The question is whether ESG investing also offers some kind of “alternative alpha”, or outperformance against the traditional benchmarks. There are managers and academics who are enthusiastic and hope for the outperformance of the good ESG stocks. However, the academic research community is really split. Some academic papers show positive alpha for “Saints” (good ESG stocks); others show significantly positive alpha for “Sinners” (bad ESG stocks). So, how it’s in reality? Is it “Good to be Bad”? Or the other way around?

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Hello ChatGPT, Can You Backtest Strategy for Me?

October 18, 2023

You may remember our blog post from the end of March, where we tested the current state-of-the-art LLM chatbot. Time flies fast. More than six months have passed since our last article, and half a year in a fast-developing field like Artificial intelligence feels like ten times more. So, we are here to revisit our article and try some new hacks! Has the OpenAI chatbot made any significant improvement? Can ChatGPT be used as a backtesting engine? We retake our risk parity asset allocation and test the limits of current AI development again!

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An Introduction to Machine Learning Research Related to Quantitative Trading

September 26, 2023

Following the recent release of the popular large language model ChatGPT, the topic of machine learning and AI seems to have skyrocketed in popularity. The concept of machine learning is, however, a much older one and has been the topic of various research and technology projects over the last decade and even longer. In this article, we would like to discuss what machine learning is, how it can be used in quantitative trading, and how has the popularity of ML strategies increased over the years.

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Analysis of Price-Based Quantitative Strategies for Country Valuation

September 18, 2023

The motivation for this study comes from the idea of simplifying the concept of relative valuation among the countries. There exist several ideas for relative value approaches that compare the “visible price” (or market capitalization) of the stock market to some unseen “intrinsic value” of the market. The ideas of what we can use to measure the unseen “intrinsic value” of each individual country/market are numerous – it may be a number derived from GDP (like in a Buffet Indicator), total earnings of listed companies in the selected country (Shiller’s CAPE ratio), or ratios derived from yields, demographic, etc., etc. We asked ourselves – can we create a relative valuation model and use just the price data?

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The Seasonality of Bitcoin

September 13, 2023

Seasonality effects, one of the most fascinating phenomena in the world of finance, have captured the attention of investors and researchers worldwide. Since these anomalies are often driven by factors other than general market trends, they usually don’t correlate strongly with market movements, which can help reduce the portfolio’s overall risk. Following the theme of our previous article Are There Seasonal Intraday or Overnight Anomalies in Bitcoin?, we decided to extend the data and conduct a more in-depth analysis of our earlier findings. This article explores potential seasonal patterns related to Bitcoin, focusing on whether these patterns are influenced by factors such as current market trends or the level of volatility in the market.

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Avoid Equity Bear Markets with a Market Timing Strategy – Revisiting Our Research

August 18, 2023

In March, we posted a series of three articles where our goal was to construct a market timing strategy that would reliably sidestep the equity market during bear markets. In this article, we revisit our research to address the forward-looking bias in our final market timing strategy. Upon careful examination, we identified a bias in our macroeconomic trading signal based on the U.S. S&P Composite dividends. To eliminate the issue, we have replaced the signal from U.S. S&P Composite dividends with Housing Starts Growth sourced from FRED, ensuring the strategy is no longer biased.

The unbiased version of our TrendYCMacro strategy, which uses the HOUSE signal, yields an annual excess return of 6.59%, slightly below the 7.10% of the biased version with the DIVIDEND signal. Interestingly, the unbiased version experiences slightly lower annualized volatility at 11.87% compared to the 11.89% of the biased version. Both versions have suffered the same maximal drawdown of -25.13% and exhibit comparable risk-adjusted returns, with the unbiased version having a Sharpe ratio of 0.56 and the biased version having a Sharpe ratio of 0.60.

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