I published a bitcoin swing trading strategy in 2015 over here (German only). Time to review the methodology of swing trading and have a look on the performance. Can a rational strategy get an edge in an irrational market? Have a look and be surprised! Continue reading
Classical technical indicators like RSI and Stochastic are commonly used to build algorithmic trading strategies. But do these indicators really give you an edge in your market? Are they able to define the times when you want to be invested? This article will show you a way to quantify and compare the edge of technical indicators. Knowing the edge of the indicator makes it an easy task to select the right indicator for your market.
Any technical indicator, let it be RSI, moving averages or jobless claims, has got a primary goal. It should signal if it is a wise idea to be invested or not. If this indicator signal has any value, on the next day the market should have a higher return than it has on average. Otherwise the usage of no indicator and a buy and hold investing approach would be the best solution.
The edge of an indicator in investing consists of two legs.
Analyzing at which time daily market extremes are established shows the significance of the first and last hours of market action. See how different markets show different behavior and see what can be learned from this analysis.
A day of trading usually starts with a lot of fantasies for the future, then we try to survive the day and end it with a lot of hope for tomorrow. This psychological pattern can also be shown when analyzing intraday market data. A high level of fantasies usually leads to a strong market movement, and thus market extremes can often be seen near the beginning or the end of the trading session. Continue reading
The stock market shows some astonishingly stable date based patterns. Using a performance heat map of the S&P500 index, these patterns are easily found.
The chart below shows the profit factor of a long only strategy investing in the S&P500. Green is good, red is bad. The strategy is strictly date based. It always buys and sells on specific days of the month. Continue reading
Adding some random noise to historic market data can be a great way to test the stability of your trading strategy. A stable strategy will show similar profits with noisy and original data. If the noise has a great impact on your results, the strategy might be over fitted to the actual historic data.
Generating completely synthetic market data to test algorithmic trading strategies is a dangerous endeavour. You easily lose significant properties like classic chart patterns or the trend properties of your market. Continue reading
Monte Carlo Simulation uses the historic returns of your trading strategy to generate scenarios for future strategy returns. It provides a visual approach to volatility and can overcome limitations of other statistical methods.
Monte Carlo is the synonymous for a random process like the numbers picked by a roulette wheel. Continue reading
Factor investing has been around in portfolio management for some years. Based on algorithmic rules it became the big thing in trading and the ETF industry. But is there still some money to be made? Is small beta still smart or just beta? This article will give you a Tradesignal framework to test the factor investing ideas by your own.
Buy and hold has been a profitable approach in investing. But customers ask for more. So technical analysis came around and held up the promise that market timing is possible. As the returns did not match this promise, algorithmic trading was invented. Clearly defined rules made it possible to backtest any given strategy, and if done properly, the returns equal the ones promised during the backtest. But this requires a lot of intellectual power and relies on cheap execution, so these returns are usually not available to the public. Continue reading
This article is about the dollar cost averaging investment strategy and the influence of luck in it.
To invest parts of your income into financial markets has been a profitable approach, especially in times when bond yields are low. One approach to do so is the dollar cost averaging investment strategy. Continue reading
Since S&P500 has lost 20% from its top in 2018 and everybody is talking about bear markets. See what has happened in history.
We all have been spoiled by artificially low volatility over the last years.
Now people blame the gone-wild president or algorithmic trading for the market correction, but let us have a look into history to see how common market corrections have been over the last century. Continue reading
Analysing the market performance of the day session vs. the overnight movement reveals some interesting facts.
The chart below gives a visual impression on where the performance of the SPY ETF is coming from.
The grey line represents a simple buy and hold approach. The green line shows the performance if you would have held SPY only during daytime, closing out in the evening and re-opening the position in the morning. Continue reading
Gentrification has got a new victim; After 33 years my favourite pub in Berlin, Syndikat, has been kicked out by unethical investment company Pears Global Real Estate, run by the family patriarch Mark Pears. Continue reading
So you are bullish on a specific stock, but you also have realised that timing is major problem? So what would be the best strategy to implement your bullish opinion but avoid the problems of any timing strategy?
Selling a put option might be the answer.
For discussing this question let’s use the current Apple chart as an example. The question is, if you are bullish on apple, should you buy 100 Apple stocks right away or should you sell an at-the-money put option. To find the pros and cons of these two possibilities let’s have a look at some charts. Continue reading
“The stock market is never obvious. It is designed to fool most of the people, most of the time” Jesse Livermore
Technical analysis is a form of market analysis based on historic price patterns. The basic assumption of technical analysis is, that human behaviour does not change over time, and thus similar historic market behaviour will lead to similar future behaviour. Technical analysis is a predictive form of analysis, a technical analyst will try to estimate what the market might most probably do over the next period of time. Continue reading
In this article I will discuss a simple algorithmic stock picking approach based on momentum and volatility. The goal will be to generate excess returns versus a capital weighted stock basket.
Investing in assets with low volatility and high return is on a lot of peoples wish list. Portfolios which archive this goal will have a high Sharpe ratio and in the end get the investors money. By reverse engineering this criteria, one can find promising stocks to invest in and out perform a given capital weighted index.
Alpha and beta are measures to describe an assets performance relative to its index. Both are used in the CAPM – capital asset pricing model.
Alpha is a measure for an assets excess return compared to an index. Continue reading
Markets have a high degree of randomness (and madness), but there are some things which hardly change over time. One is the width of an average market move before a counter-move can be observed. Continue reading
Over the last days and weeks some traders have been worried if the currently ongoing correction in the markets will evolve into a crash, or if it is just a normal correction.
The main difference between a correction and a crash is the panic level. But it is not the absolute level of .VIX, the CBOE implied volatility meter. It is the difference between realized and implied volatility that defines a crash which defines real panic. Continue reading
Usually it makes no sense to fight against normal distribution. But there are setups which have got a high probability of unexpected behaviour. Volatility can be the key to future market movements.
Bollinger Bands are a great tool to describe market volatility. And my favourite tool to measure the width of Bollinger Bands is Bollinger percentile.
Like the IV percentile indicator my Bollinger percentile indicator is a probabilistic indicator. It gives the probability of Bollinger Bands having a narrower upper band – lower band range than currently given. Continue reading
The Weis Wave indicator combines trend and volume information. It seems to be of some interest for timing short term market reversals. Here comes a version of this indicator for usage in Tradesignal.
The basic idea of the Weis Wave indicator is to sum up the traded volume, as long as the market moves in the same direction. The bullish volume wave is displayed in green. As soon as the market changes direction, a red wave is constructed. by comparing the magnitude of the Weis wave with the magnitude of the market move, valuable insights for short term market timing can be found.
More information can be found via a web search or from the page I got the idea form: https://weisonwyckoff.com/weis-wave/ Continue reading
Implied volatility data is key in options trading. This article shows how to access free volatility data in the Tradesignal software suite.
Thanks to https://www.optionstrategist.com/calculators/free-volatility-data implied volatility and IV percentile data is available. For free on a weekly basis. Using this data and the given code the data can be loaded into Tradesignal. This enables you to do your custom market scans, combining Tradesignal technical analysis and the implied volatility data from the optionstrategist website.
The first step to use the optionstrategist data would be to safe it into a text file. Just copy and paste the data, no additional formatting is required. The free data on the website is updated every Continue reading
Volatility trading: when to buy and when to sell volatility
You got to know when to hold ’em,
Know when to fold ’em,
Know when to walk away,
And know when to run.
(Kenny Rogers)
Volatility is a nicely reverting time series. If it is high chances are good that it will come down again. The only problem is to find out when volatility is high, and when it is low. Unfortunately there are no absolute levels, you can’t say that 50% implied volatility is high, as this specific stock might have an implied volatility of 80% most of the time. So you can only compare the current volatility level to historic levels and so define if volatility is currently high or low. Continue reading