Trend Following with Managed Futures: The Search for Crisis Alpha (Wiley, 2014) by Alex Greyserman and Kathryn M. Kaminski is an academically rigorous book with a practical bent. Although on the surface it appears to have a narrow focus, in reality it covers a broad spectrum of important but often overlooked investing concepts. Even readers who have no real interest in managed futures can learn a great deal from it, especially if they have some familiarity with financial statistics.
The authors start with an 800-year historical perspective and then discuss trend following basics, theoretical foundations, trend following as an alternative asset class, benchmarking and style analysis, and trend following in an investment portfolio.
Here I’ll simply highlight a couple of ideas that are central to the book’s thesis.
Let’s start with the notion of crisis alpha. “Crisis alpha opportunities are profits that are gained by exploiting the persistent trends that occur across markets during times of crisis.” (p. 145) Viewed in the context of the adaptive market hypothesis set forth by Andrew Lo in 2004, “for both behavioral and institutional reasons, market crisis represents a time when market participants become synchronized in their actions creating trends in markets. It is only the select (few) most adaptable market players who are able to take advantage of these ‘crisis alpha’ opportunities.” (p. 73)
Archives of “Entertainment_Culture” tag
rssA Review: “Two Centuries of Trend Following”
The paper “Two Centuries of Trend Following” by Lemperiere, Derenble, Seager, et al of Capital Fund Management purports to show that trend following has been profitable, over a wide range of markets, consistently over 200 years. It deserves to be reviewed as it represents a case study of the statistical practices, and armchair explanations that are sometimes used to justify a system that in the most recent five year period has lost its mojo. Rocky has asked me to review it.
The amazing thing is that the authors seem to know how to compute hyperbolic tangent regressions, and compute the duration of a drawdown given a sharpe ratio, yet they seem completely unaware of the problem of multicollinearity, overlapping observations, and lack of independent observations.
In a nutshell, they compute hundreds of thousands of means, and they combine them and measure how far away from randomness they are. Recall that the average of two random observations is about 0.7 times as variable as one observations. The average of 100,000 observations is about 1/320 as variable as 1 observation. (more…)
THREE LEGS OF SUCCESSFUL TRADING
If you ever read any book on trading you would notice that every author our there talking about three most important things of successful trading and investing are:
- Trading edge
- Money management
- Discipline or psychology
Depending on the book one is reading one of those three are emphasized more or less. If you read book on technical analysis author will say that having edge is most important, and even if you have PhD in psychology if you don’t have proper edge you will not be able to make money.
If you read book on psychology again author will tell you that you can have best trading system on the world if you are not able to take signals you will not be successful trader and that you must make system that will suit your personality.
Finally if you read book on money management, author will tell you that even if you have best system in the world and having best discipline in the world if you risk too much of your capital on each trade you will probably ruin your account and the game will be over.
That post made me think about is it really like that, can we represent those three characteristic as pyramid. Is one more important than the other?
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5 Essential Qualities of the Speculator
1. Self-Reliance. A man must think for himself,must follow his own convictions. George MacDonald says: “A man cannot have another man’s ideas any more than he can another man’s soul or another man’s body.” Self-trust is the foundation of successful effort.
2. Judgment. That equipoise, that nice adjustment of the faculties one to the other,which is called good judgment, is an essential to the speculator.
3. Courage. That is, confidence to act on the decisions of the mind. In speculation there is value in Mirabeau’s dictum: “Be bold, still be bold; always be bold.”
4. Prudence. The power of measuring the danger, together with a certain alertness and watchfulness, is very important. There should be a balance of these two, Prudence and Courage;Prudence in contemplation, Courage in execution.
Lord Bacon says: “In meditation all dangers should be seen; in execution one, unless very formidable.”
Connected with these qualities,properly an outgrowth of them, is a third, viz:promptness. The mind convinced, the act should follow. In the words of Macbeth; “Henceforth the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand.” Think, act, promptly.
5. Pliability. The ability to change an opinion,the power of revision. “He who observes,”says Emerson, “and observes again, is always formidable.”
The qualifications named are necessary to the makeup of a speculator, but they must be in well-balanced combination. A deficiency or an overplus of one quality will destroy the effectiveness of all. The possession of such faculties, in a proper adjustment is, of course, uncommon. In speculation, as in life, few succeed,many fail.
The 10 Scariest Things in Trading
I was reading this article and started thinking about the ten scariest things in trading: The Top Ten Things That Make Horror Movies Scary.
1. Fear of Death. This is the ultimate fear, both existentially and psychologically. It isn’t really a horror movie if people don’t get killed.
In Trading: fear of depletion of assets.
2. The Dark. From our earliest childhood we are afraid of the dark – not the dark itself, but what it hides. It makes horror movies even scarier to watch them in a darkened theater, or a dark living room, right?
In Trading: not knowing enough news
3. Creepy, Crawly Things. Snakes, spiders, rats, and other crawling things are scary in and of themselves, but when they touch the skin, in the dark, it amplifies this common phobia.
In Trading: monthly expenses
4. Scary Places. Horror movies are full of scary places – graveyards, old houses, overgrown forests, dungeons, attics, basements. These are dark places, where evil things can hide.
In Trading: instruments or markets that one had very bad experiences with.
5. Disfigurement. Many horror movies feature grotesquely disfigured antagonists (think Frankenstein’s monster, the Phantom of the Opera, zombies). Studies in early development have found that young infants will react with fear to asymmetrical or disordered faces. (more…)
WallStreet Movies and S&P 500 :Great Correlation
If you had gotten out of the market when these movies were released, you’d definitely have missed some big moves…to the upside. Wall Street came out after the crash of ’87 in December 1987, and taking money off the table for the multi-year bull market that followed would have been a big miss. Boiler Room came out just a month before the peak in 2000, so in this case it was a good sell signal.
The sequel to the original Wall Street, Money Never Sleeps came out during a leg down in the current bull market in 2010, and its placement in the upper chart is a bit misleading. Yes, filming for the movie began in late 2009, but the market bottomed in early 2009. Whether you use the dates they began filming or the release date, Money Never Sleeps did not coincide with a peak for the equity market, and in retrospect was a great time to get in. As for the Wolf of Wall Street? Only time will tell, but keep in mind that unlike the other movies, it is not intended to be set in present day, instead romanticizing the heady days of the 1990s. (more…)
Don't be ignorant. We're all humans on a small, floating rock through an infinite galaxy, together. Enjoy it instead.
THREE LEGS OF SUCCESSFUL TRADING
If you ever read any book on trading you would notice that every author our there talking about three most important things of successful trading and investing are:
- Trading edge
- Money management
- Discipline or psychology
Depending on the book one is reading one of those three are emphasized more or less. If you read book on technical analysis author will say that having edge is most important, and even if you have PhD in psychology if you don’t have proper edge you will not be able to make money.
If you read book on psychology again author will tell you that you can have best trading system on the world if you are not able to take signals you will not be successful trader and that you must make system that will suit your personality.
Finally if you read book on money management, author will tell you that even if you have best system in the world and having best discipline in the world if you risk too much of your capital on each trade you will probably ruin your account and the game will be over.
To answer I would ask you following: What is more important heart or brain? Eyes or ears? Legs or Arms?
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11 One Liners for Traders
- Buy from the scared, sell to the greedy.
- Buy their pain, not their gain.
- Successful traders are quick to change their minds and have little pride of opinion.
- I made my money because I always got out too soon. (Bernard Baruch)
- Don’t try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. It can’t be done except by liars. (Bernard Baruch)
- Throughout all my years of investing I’ve found that the big money was never made in the buying or the selling. The big money was made in the waiting. (Jesse Livermore)
- The faster a stock has climbed, the quicker it will fall.
- The more certain the crowd is, the surer it is to be wrong. (Menschel)
- Bear markets begin in good times. Bull markets begin in bad times
- Never confuse genius with a bull market.
- Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit
Atkeson & Houghton, Win By Not Losing-Book Review
Nicholas Atkeson and Andrew Houghton, founding partners of Delta Investment Management, have written what, in the words of the lengthy subtitle, is a disciplined approach to building and protecting your wealth in the stock market by managing your risk. Win By Not Losing (McGraw-Hill, 2013) is a mix of stories about some not-so-famous investors (in fact, a few are identified simply by their first names) and an introduction to tactical investing.
The authors contend that “stock prices are influenced by oddities in human behavior that often cause security pricing to be predictable.” (p. 120) They support their contention by sharing some of their observations from the trading floor of an investment bank. Earnings momentum, for instance, can be both predictable and profitable: “the cycle of exceeding analysts’ estimates is often predictable in light of the pressures on analysts to be overly conservative.” (p. 121) And one study found that “over the 60 trading days after an earnings announcement, a long position in stocks with unexpected earnings in the highest decile, combined with a short position in stocks in the lowest decile, yields an annualized ‘abnormal’ return of about 25 percent before transaction costs.” (p. 122) (more…)