A correct backtest of a trading strategy requires accurate historical data. This isn't controversial. Historical data that is full of errors will generate fictitious profits for mean-reverting strategies, since noise in prices is mean-reverting. However, what is lesser known is how perfectly accurate capture of historical prices, if done in a sub-optimal way, can still lead to dangerously inflated backtest results. I will illustrate this with three simple strategies.
CEF Premum Reversion
Patro et al published a paper on trading the mean reversion of closed-end funds’ (CEF) premium. Based on rational analysis, the market value of a CEF should be the same as the net asset value (NAV) of its holdings. So the strategy to exploit any differences is both reasonable and simple: rank all the CEF's by their % difference ("premium") between market value and NAV, and short the quintile with the highest premium and buy the quintile with the lowest (maybe negative) premium. Hold them for a month, and repeat. (You can try this on a daily basis too, since Bloomberg provides daily NAV data.) The Sharpe ratio of this strategy from 1998-2011 is 1.5. Transaction costs are ignored, but shouldn't be significant for a monthly rebalance strategy.
The authors are irreproachable for their use of high quality price data provided by CRSP and monthly fund NAV data from Bloomberg for their backtest. So I was quite confident that I can reproduce their results with the same data from CRSP, and with historical NAV data from Compustat instead. Indeed, here is the cumulative returns chart from my own backtest (click to enlarge):
However, I also know that there is one detail that many traders and academic researchers neglect when they backtest daily strategies for stocks, ETFs, or CEFs. They often use the "consolidated" closing price as the execution price, instead of the "official" (also called "auction" or "primary") closing price. To understand the difference, one has to remember that the US stock market is a network of over 60 "market centers" (see the teaching notes of Prof. Joel Hasbrouck for an excellent review of the US stock market structure). The exact price at which one's order will be executed is highly dependent on the exact market center to which it has been routed. A natural way to execute this CEF strategy is to send a market-on-close (MOC) or limit-on-close (LOC) order near the close, since this is the way we can participate in the closing auction and avoid paying the bid-ask spread. Such orders will be routed to the primary exchange for each stock, ETF, or CEF, and the price it is filled at will be the official/auction/primary price at that exchange. On the other hand, the price that most free data service (such as Yahoo Finance) provides is the consolidated price, which is merely that of the last transaction received by the Securities Information Processor (SIP) from any one of these market centers on or before 4pm ET. There is no reason to believe that one's order will be routed to that particular market center and was executed at that price at all. Unfortunately, the CEF strategy was tested on this consolidated price. So I decide to backtest it again with the official closing price.
Where can we find historical official closing price? Bloomberg provides that, but it is an expensive subscription. CRSP data has conveniently included the last bid and ask that can be used to compute the mid price at 4pm which is a good estimate of the official closing price. This mid price is what I used for a revised backtest. But the CRSP data also doesn't come cheap - I only used it because my academic affiliation allowed me free access. There is, however, an unexpected source that does provide the official closing price at a reasonable rate: QuantGo.com will rent us tick data that has a Cross flag for the closing auction trade. How ironic: the cheapest way to properly backtest a strategy that trades only once a month requires tick data time-stamped at 1 millisecond, with special tags for each trade!
So what is the cumulative returns using the mid price for our backtest?
Opening Gap Reversion
Readers of my book will be familiar with this strategy (Example 4.1): start with the SPX universe, buy the 10 stocks that gapped down most at the open, and short the 10 that gapped up most. Liquidate everything at the close. We can apply various technical or fundamental filters to make this strategy more robust, but the essential driver of the returns is mean-reversion of the overnight gap (i.e. reversion of the return from the previous close to today's open).
We have backtested this strategy using the closing mid price as I recommended above, and including a further 5 bps transaction cost each for the entry and exit trade. The backtest looked wonderful, so we traded it live. Here is the comparison of the backtest vs live cumulative P&L:
Yes, it is still mildly profitable, but nowhere near the profitability of the backtest, or more precisely, walk-forward test. What went wrong? Two things:
- Just like the closing price, we should have used the official/auction/primary open price. Unfortunately CRSP does not provide the opening bid-ask, so we couldn't have estimated the open price from the mid price. QuantGo, though, does provide a Cross flag for the opening auction trade as well.
- To generate the limit on open (LOO) or market on open (MOO) orders suitable for executing this strategy, we need to submit the order using the pre-market quotes before 9:28am ET, based on Nasdaq's rules.
Once again, a strategy that is seemingly low frequency, with just an entry at the open and an exit at the close, actually requires TAQ (ticks and quotes) data to backtest properly.
Futures Momentum
Lest you think that this requirement for TAQ data for backtesting only applies to mean reversion strategies, we can consider the following futures momentum strategy that can be applied to the gasoline (RB), gold (GC), or various other contracts trading on the NYMEX.
At the end of a trading session (defined as the previous day's open outcry close to today's open outcry close), rank all the trades or quotes in that session. We buy a contract in the next session if the last price is above the 95th percentile, sell it if it drops below the 60th (this serves as a stop loss). Similarly, we short a contract if the last price is below the 5th percentile, and buy cover if it goes above the 40th.
Despite being an intraday strategy, it typically trades only 1 roundtrip a day - a low frequency strategy. We backtested it two ways: with 1-min trade bars (prices are from back-adjusted continuous contracts provided by eSignal), and with best bid-offer (BBO) quotes with 1 ms time stamps (from QuantGo's actual contract prices, not backadjusted).
For all the contracts that we have tested, the 1-ms data produced much worse returns than the 1-min data. The reason is interesting: 1-ms data shows that the strategy exhibits high frequency flip-flops. These are sudden changes in the order book (in particular, BBO quotes) that quickly revert. Some observers have called these flip-flops "mini flash crashes", and they happen as frequently in the futures as in the stock market, and occasionally in the spot Forex market as well. Some people have blamed it on high frequency traders. But I think flip-flop describe the situation better than flash crash, since flash crash implies the sudden disappearance of quotes or liquidity from the order book, while in a flip-flopping situation, new quotes/liquidity above the BBO can suddenly appear and disappear in a few milliseconds, simultaneous with the disappearance and re-appearance of quotes on the opposite side of the order book. Since ours is a momentum strategy, such reversals of course create losses. These losses are very real, and we experienced it in live trading. But these losses are also undetectable if we backtest using 1-min bar data.
Some readers may object: if the 1-min bar backtest shows good profits, why not just trade this live with 1-min bar data and preserve its profit? Let's consider why this doesn't actually allow us to avoid using TAQ data. Note that we were able to avoid the flip-flops using 1-min data only because we were lucky in our backtest - it wasn't because we had some trading rule that prevented our entering or exiting a position when the flip-flops occurred. How then are we to ensure that our luck will continue with live market data? At the very least, we have to test this strategy with many sets of 1-min bar data, and choose the set that shows the worst returns as part of our stress testing. For example, one set may be [9:00:00, 9:01:00, 9:02:00, ...,] and the second set may be [9:00:00.001, 9:01:00.001, 9:02:00.001, ...], etc. This backtest, however, still requires TAQ data, since no historical data vendor I know of provides such multiple sets of time-shifted bars!
As I mentioned above, these flip-flops are omnipresent in the stock market as well. This shouldn't be surprising considering that 50% of the stock transaction volume is due to high frequency trading. It is particularly damaging when we are trading spreads, such as the ETF pair EWA vs EWC. A small change in the BBO of a leg may represent a big percentage change in the spread, which itself may be just a few ticks wide. So such flip-flops can frequently trigger orders which are filled at much worse prices than expected.
Conclusion
The three example strategies above illustrate that even when a strategy trades at low frequency, maybe as low as once a month, we often still require high frequency TAQ data to backtest it properly, or even economically. If the strategy trades intraday, even if just once a day, then this requirement becomes all the more important due to the flip-flopping of the order book in the millisecond time frame.
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138 comments:
You are making general inductions from two examples that represent noise trading. naturally there would be affected by noise in closing prices. But you conclusions do not apply to all strategies. Look at the cumulative return of the first strategy: it is only +0.8%. This is noise and will be affected by small changes in closing values. The same holds for the second strategy: 0.35%. It is not the closing price, it is the strategies you are testing that have the problems and the data just tell you that. I challenge you to do the same for a moving average cross over system in S&P 500. Will you get any significant differences? The conclusions from your article is about the strategies, not about the data because the future can be different than the past. In other words the conclusion should be: Beware of noise trading.
I am afraid you have misinterpreted the cumulative returns of the first strategy: it is over 60%, not 0.8%.
Also, the third strategy is given especially in anticipation of some readers who would object that this phenomenon only applies to mean-reversion strategies ("noise-trading" in your parlance). That is a momentum strategy, and if it were to rely only on noise, it would not have generated any positive returns when backtested with 1-min data. Noise kills that strategy, but noise is not the profit driver.
We trade live a highly profitable mean-reverting strategy, so I believe "Beware of Noise Trading" would not be an accurate portrayal.
Ernie
Yes Sir, 60%, sorry for the typo, but in 7+ years, averaging less than 10% return. This can be noise trading. You should be able to find many such strategies that are sensitive to variations in the closing price. You are committing to a logical fallacy here of generalization. You should not trade any strategy that is sensitive to noise in execution price. Actually what you have proven is that some strategies are sensitive to variation in prices. You have not proven that ALL strategies are sensitive and that high freq data are required to test them. Do you think that a strategy that trades twice a week QQQ with about $2 PT/ST should be back-tested on millisecond data? Please if you think so, say it.
My article is not a mathematical proof. I do not claim that ALL strategies require 1-millisecond data. I said you should carefully consider if yours does require such data.
The CEF strategy trades only once a month, yet it requires 1-min data to backtest economically, unless you have expensive Bloomberg or CRSP subscription. So yes, if you trade QQQ twice a week at the close, you do actually need 1-ms data to backtest without Bloomberg/CRSP.
Ernie
Ernie, thanks for this post. Would you mind posting some performance figures (Sharpe etc) on the intraday futures momentum strategy you mentioned? I ran this on 35 commodities over 10 years using minutely data and I'm afraid I do not get anything remotely looking like a good strategy - at least with these parameters. In fact, some commodities such as Beans likely show opposing behaviour, whereas for other commodities (RB, NG, CL, etc) it appears to be mostly noise. Are there any details that I am missing? Let me know - If you prefer, I can also contact you via email.
Kind Regards
Applying the futures strategy to GC from 201001-201312 using 1-min data backadjusted contract data from eSignal, we obtained a Sharpe ratio of 1 and APR of 18.7%, assuming 0 transaction costs.
Ernie
What kind of execution lag are you using? I would guess a strategy that is robust to a full day lag would be more robust to this sort of error than one that is only robust without a trading lag. E.g., how would the strategies you showed work if there was a 1-day lag, but still using daily data?
If your trading is successful why do you need to travel around the world and why do you need to insert affiliate links in this post to make commissions from the vendor selling the HF data? I know people who are trading and have no time to go for a walk while you travel constantly to give seminars. As far as this post, nothing is clear, nobody can confirm your findings and claims. Also, the strategies that execute at the close try mostly to arbitrage close price anomalies and are naturally very sensitive to variations in price. I would think a batter idea would be to avoid such strategies.
I am not sure what exactly you meant by an execution lag. As I mentioned, we only use prices within the previous trading session (up to the most recent open outcry close) to generate signals.
Ernie
Dear Anonymous,
I am sorry to hear that your trader friends are unable to take walks while trading. I take about 2 hours of walks a day. Furthermore, I enjoy travelling around the world giving talks and seminars. I think Milan and London are both delightful cities to visit and I very much look forward to meeting traders there. After all this walking and travel, I still have time to perform research for our fund and teaching at the Master of Predictive Analytics program at Northwestern University. The reason simply is that our systems are fully automated, and require little human intervention. (Our team does get notified of systems failures by text messages though.)
If you would like to look at our trading track records, please visit epchan.com/accounts. We can provide brokerage statements to prospective investors with serious interest. Our commodity pool's track record is audited and filed with the NFA, and also available for your review on request.
If you believe that successful fund managers should forgo revenue generated by their blogs, seminars, or books, you might wish to also contact best-selling author and fund manager Mr. Joel Greenblatt. He manages multi-billion dollars of assets, so by your logic he should give away his books free of charge.
Regarding the strategies described in this post, everyone can verify if my conclusions are correct or not. The strategies are fully described either here or in my second book or in the cited and published journal article. Please feel free to backtest using consolidated EOD data vs official close and see the differences for yourself.
Finally, regarding QuantGo: yes, I think their business is great and I do wish to support them by providing links. Our fund is a customer and we want them to prosper so that we can continue to benefit from their service. But you don't need to use QuantGo at all to backtest the first two strategies. You can subscribe to Bloomberg. For the third strategy, you can buy 1-ms data from tickdata.com instead. In a similar vein, I support all new businesses that enhance trader productivity such as Quantopian or Rizm or Marketcetera etc., to all of whom I have provided links previously.
Ernie
Hi Ernie, thanks for your post, I am concerned about the point regarding the 3rd issue. What was the percentage difference between the returns shown by per minute data, and those for live (or for with per ms data).
I have generally been concerned with backtest results - but I continuously check actual broker execution prices against the data provider's prices which are per minute, and the inevitable difference is something I consider part of the overall transaction cost - the difference being a kind of slippage. The cost, though not negligible, is not that high. Have you used per minute prices for your mean reversion strategies in the past?
Also, for the flip flops case, was there a need felt to have minimal difference between the 95 percentile price and the last price etc.?
The backtest return using 1-min data, as I wrote above, is 18.7%. The backtest return using 1-ms data is negative.
The issue for the 3rd strategy is not slippage, but the flip-flops.
We certainly used 1-min data to backtest before, but now we don't due to the issues we discovered.
I am not sure I understand your question about the minimal difference between last price and 95th percentile.
Ernie
My question for the minimal difference was that assuming a lower bound like 4 to 5 basis points could prevent a noise influenced conclusion - not sure if it is a useful idea - I was just wondering.
Dear commenters,
While I respect your desire for privacy when making anonymous comment, I do suggest that you sign it with your first name, or a nickname. That will make reading a Q&A thread that much easier for everyone.
Thank you,
Ernie
No, I don't think entering a few ticks above 95th percentile will change anything. Please note that the strategy does not exit whenever the price drops below 95th: it only exits when it drops below 60th. So the flip-flop is not a matter of just a few ticks' changes. Hence the name "mini flash crash". The change of just a few ticks won't constitute a crash.
Ernie
Hi Ernie. Thanks for the insightful, practical-oriented books, blog, and also some of your excellent comebacks in this particular thread... While the gotchas in the first two strategies are intuitive, I find the futures momentum one a bit surprising. Instead of using quotes or 1 min bar trades, couldn't you just use all trades (all ticks), excluding quotes? The strategy would be exactly the same, but you would have to test using either a) a fixed cost measure for implementation shortfall, b) execution lag (i.e. trade on lastpx at T+50ms) or c) both. I find quote data has inherently lower quality and higher degree of errors, and I would be very hesitant to use it in a strategy without proper cleaning and validation. Depending on the alpha decay in the strategy (shouldn't be too bad for this one), various clever execution approaches can minimise the total cost (slippage, opp. cost) and providing a small and fairly deterministic (over time) tracking error to sim.
Hi Rosor,
Thank you for your kind words.
Yes, we can rank trades instead of quotes, but the result won't be very different. And indeed, smarter execution strategy with a lag may help avoid some instances of flip-flops, but not all. The key problem with this strategy is not slippage, but the sudden move and reversal of the BBO and the corresponding trades.
Ernie
This is from your website:
http://www.epchan.com/accounts/
"This account has a leverage of approximately 10"
"and the client’s managed account will need similar leverage to achieve comparable results as the pool’s account. "
So you are basically a gambler because only gamblers take such risks. If your returns are adjusted for a more reasonable leverage then there are dismal.
I just warn you kindly that with these leverage levels there is risk of total loss. But wish you good luck at the same time. I hope your good luck continues.
Thank you for your good wishes.
Most FX trading strategies apply higher leverage than is customary for equity strategies because the daily movement of currency rates for major pairs seldom exceeds 1%, and never exceeds 3%. (We do not trade pairs that are pegged by central banks, such as EURCHF or USDHKD). So even at 10x leverage, 3% loss translates to 30%, hardly a "total loss" that you are concerned with. Besides, we have stop losses at much lower levels.
If you are a more risk-averse investor, you can choose a lower leverage for your managed account, such as 5x. Then 2014 return would be reduced to about 34%, and CAGR would be reduced to about 20%. This would still put us in the top quintile of hedge fund returns. (At this leverage, we will need a 20% move to suffer a "total loss". Realistically, if for e.g. EURUSD moves 20% in a day, large number of hedge funds will be out-of-business.)
Even more risk-averse investors who choose a 2.5x leverage will still enjoy nearly 10% annual return - hardly a dismal number.
If you do not wish to invest in any leveraged strategies at all, then please don't go near quantitative trading strategies or hedge funds. Investing in the SPY, with its sometimes decade-long drawdown duration, might be more suitable for your taste.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
I am curious that after Swiss National Bank abandoned the ceiling on 15 January 2015, does franc still peg euro or dollar?
Many thanks.
Swiss franc was never pegged to USD, but it was pegged to EUR. However, it was unpegged after January 15, 2015. See http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/01/economist-explains-13.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Interesting article! Thank you very much.
Btw, since it was unpegged, could we trade exchange pairs which has CHF? Or it is hard to trust Swiss central bank
anymore.
I agree that it would be hard to ever trust SNB again!
Ernie
Ernie,
I've read your books and followed your blog for about a year. I get the impression (which may be inaccurate) that you've thrown a lot of strategies aside and are focusing on the forex strategy in your commodity pool, which looks like it has performed very well. I've tried a number of strategies, no holy grails, and the approach that seems to be taking shape for me is to find enough mediocre but still positive strategies so that the portfolio Sharpe is acceptable even if the individual Sharpes are shaky.
Do you have any thoughts on this philosophical question of the holy grail vs. diversification? That is, the approach of "most strategies are disappointing so keep looking and when you find one that works, pile into it" vs "most strategies are disappointing but you can combine them into a whole that is better than the parts (as long as they're at least positive)"?
Hi Ernie,
Do you trade minor currency, SEK, NOK, and/or DKK?
Are they risky to trade? Thanks.
Hi Brian,
FX is indeed the most profitable strategy that we have traded, and that's why we are offering that to Managed Account clients. However, we do trade a variety of other futures and stocks strategies in our commodity pool for the purpose of diversification. The strategies in the pool are traded at much lower leverage than the one in the Managed Account. The pool is also performing well - up over 4% net in Q1.
Diversification of strategy is always a good idea. As you pointed out, uncorrelated strategies always increase the portfolio Sharpe ratio. Of course, one should continue to look for higher performing strategies at the same time. There is no contradiction between the two.
Ernie
We do consider NOK a commodity currency, and thus it is included in our consideration. We also used to trade SEK in a different strategy, but not at this time.
DKK is pegged by the Danish Central Bank. We don't trade pegged currencies.
(http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d3c385f6-adc6-11e4-919e-00144feab7de.html#axzz3XZ26pF8w)
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
I read your books and have your blog on me feeder. I have to thank you for all the invaluable tips you have given us over the years. You have been more than generous with the information and I find it great that you not only share some of the things you know but make sure the little guy can try them too for a reasonable price.
I use moc orders from time to time and was quite surprised when you said the primary and consolidated closing price are different. What I have seen in my personal experience is that they are the same.
So I did a little test with a bloomberg terminal. I took the first 50 companies in the sp500 and got the closing prices for the last ten days. I not only got the prices from the primary exchange but the consolidated too and then I took the closing prices from google finance.
This means we had 100 comparisons (50 primary vs consolidated and 50 primary vs google finance) each day and for a total a 10 days that gives us 1000 comparisons.
Now I took the differences in prices and added everything together from both comparisons... results: $0.00.
I might be doing something wrong because it looks pretty simple and straightforward. Have you tried this in bloomberg? and if so what commands did you use?
Regards,
Leo
p.s some times there are little differences, for instance if you check MSFT on the 15th on april you see that the closing price was 42.255 (http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/historical). That is on the nasdaq website and also in bloomberg but in google you see 42.26, probably because of rounding errors.
Hi Leo,
Thanks to our research associate Yang, we have compiled some examples to illustrate the differences between auction and consolidated prices below:
From 201001 to 201412, there are 200 dates when the auction price and the consolidated price are significantly different for AAPL. E.g.
auction consolidated
2010-04-27 262.26 262.04
2010-06-22 273.43 273.85
2010-07-22 259.29 259.29
2014-10-28 106.71 106.74
2011-06-10 325.57 325.90
Similarly for GOOGL:
date "consolidated-auction"
2014-12-30 4.86003
2014-12-29 6.98000
2014-12-26 7.49002
2014-12-24 8.15999
2014-12-23 8.18002
2014-12-22 7.42999
2014-12-19 3.68998
2014-12-18 3.52000
2014-12-17 1.56001
2014-12-16 2.77000
2014-12-15 2.04003
2014-12-12 2.85001
2014-12-11 3.76999
2014-12-10 1.97998
2014-12-09 2.73999
We don't subscribe to Bloomberg anymore, but I remember they use a different suffix (.P? .N?) to indicate primary exchange prices.
Ernie
Ernie - should we conclude that losing money to flip-flops is due to higher frequency players that are aware of these strategies and can game them?
Hi Julian,
Nanex.net has an extensive database of instances of mini flash crashes: http://www.nanex.net/NxResearch/ResearchPage/3/
There is also abundant academic research on it. See for e.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.6667.pdf
The consensus is that this is due to HFT, but I don't know that we can conclude HFT is able to profit from this, or whether it is just a side-effect.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
The closing price on Nasdaq for AAPL on 2014-10-28 was 106.74.
The 106.71 comes from arca, bats or edgx.
I would double check the data source if I had money on the line.
Regards,
Leo
Hi Ernie,
Would you say there are any problems of going short emerging market currencies? For example in the forward market?
You can go short EM currencies very easily in the spot market. Why would you need to go to the forward market?
Some EM currencies are very liquid.
Ernie
Well, the forward market will give you the implied interest-rate differential which the spot market will not.
We trade very short term strategies, so the differential interest rate doesn't matter to us.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Do you trade CFDs? What is your comment? Thanks.
No, US investors are not permitted to trade CFDs.
Ernie
Hello Ernie, you mentioned EM currencies. Can you comment on the liquidity for USD/NOK vs EUR/NOK? Also, does your team consider CZK, HUF etc.?
Thanks,
-Andy
Hi Andy,
USDNOK volume is certainly lower than EURNOK. For a complete survey, see
https://www.bis.org/publ/rpfx13.htm?m=6%7C35
and
http://www.newyorkfed.org/fxc/2015/octfxsurvey2014.pdf
We do not trade CZK and HUF.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Do you do arbitrage between an ETF and part of its component stocks using cointegration? What is your comment? Many thanks.
I have done research on the arbitrage between ETF and its components, but have not traded it live. I am concerned by the data-snooping bias that may be involved. See epchan.blogspot.com/2007/02/in-looking-for-pairs-of-financial.html
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Does that mean the out-of-sample performance is not very good?
Besides XLE and SPY (your new book), have you tried other ETFs? Thanks.
That's right: out-of-sample performance is much worse than in-sample. I may have tried one or two other ETFs, but the general conclusion is the same.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
When we use trade price to backtest a strategy, usually how many ticks do we consider for bid-ask spread and slippages for liquid stocks in US market?
The spread is highly stock-dependent, even for "liquid" stocks. If measured by ticks, it will vary widely depending on stock price. So it is more sensible to measure it by basis points. 1 or 2 bps are common for SPX stocks.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Thank you for sharing the article, "Trader Charged With Manipulation That Contributed to May 2010 ‘Flash Crash’".
I believe that there are other HF traders doing the same things. Does that mean limit order books are not reliable for short-term trading since HF traders can manipulate them? Thanks.
Nav Sarao, the trader who allegedly "caused" the flash crash, is far from a HFT. By his own admissions, he point-and-click trades.
Limit order book in the stock market is, however, highly subject to manipulation. Half of my MFT course is about the different kinds of manipulation people do, and how to protect yourself against them.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Do you know any "real prop trading firm" in the world?
"real" means they do not make money from their traders. Thanks.
If by "not making money from their traders" you mean they do not charge their traders monthly fees, exorbitant commissions, etc., then yes, there are such prop trading firms. In fact, most HFT shops belong to this category. But these firms only hire traders with demonstrated track records.
Ernie
Hi Leo,
Sorry for the late reply about the AAPL closing price on 2014-10-28. It took our analysts quite some time working with QuantGo to figure out what's going on.
On that day, the Algoseek tick data is mysteriously missing the Nasdaq auction tick, so our algorithm picked the next biggest (largest volume) auction, which is on ARCA with price=$106.71.
We have alerted Algoseek of this problem and they are looking into why the Nasdaq tick is missing.
On the other hand, it is certainly not true that consolidated closing prices and official (auction) closing prices are always the same.
Looking at AAPL on 2010-04-27, for e.g., Nasdaq auction close is $262.26, while the consolidated close is $262.04. Do you agree based on your Bloomberg prices?
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
For HFT shops, do you mean their latency is less than 1 ms, and they trade with co-location?
Many so called prop trading firms also ask their traders to pay risk deposits and training fees. I think they make quite good risk-free returns from their traders.
Yes, by HFT shops I meant those that need to have < 1ms latency.
These shops hire traders as employees, and will share profits and sometimes even pay salaries. They of course charge commissions from their traders, but do not charge desk fees.
A good example is Hudson River Trading.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
May I ask how your old boss makes so much money? What is his trading strategy? Thanks.
Millennium Partner operates almost like a fund of funds. They hire lots of traders, and everyone has some capital allocation and trade their own strategies as they see fit, (subject to risk constraints of course). No collaboration between traders are expected nor encouraged.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
May I ask why your FX managed account has only 5.88% return in 2013?
Is there any way to improve it? Thanks.
Many investors wondered what happened to our 2013 net return which, as you pointed out, were just 5% or so. The answer is that it has nothing to do with our strategy - it has to do with the entire FX market that year. Irrespective of currency pair, the volume and volatility of the market reached a low that is unseen in recent years. Large FX hedge funds such as FX Concepts went out of business, further draining liquidity. (See http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/19/us-forex-hedgefunds-idUSBRE9BI0P720131219). But just as suddenly, in mid-2014, volume returned, and all became normal again.
Ernie
Hi Ernie, I think you indicated this in a comment some time back - but wanted to confirm, you do use a VPIN like check against fx tail events, with IB snapshot or a related data source?
Thanks,
-JT
Hi JT,
Naturally I can't tell you what we use exactly in a production strategy. But there are some considerations about using VPIN:
1) Many FX brokers do not show you the volume, at least in a timely manner. So we can't use VPIN directly for FX.
2) There is no such problem in the futures markets.
3) There are some recent criticisms of VPIN in general: http://t.co/OTUhVT7fHv
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
If your strategy is to trade once per month and the difference between consolidated and auction price is as reported on example above around 0.1%, thus having such a big difference in performance is a bit weird, isn't it? Is it due to the leverage?
In addition, does the bias between the two prices is correlated with strategies used? It seems to me that bias works always against the strategy.
Thanks
Jan
Hi Jan,
The example above used AAPL, the most liquid stocks. A typical CEF is far less liquid, and the difference between auction and consolidated price is likely far higher than 0.1%.
Furthermore, the CEF reversal strategy picked the outliers in returns to form the monthly portfolio. Hence it often picks those stocks with consolidated prices that are especially different from the auction prices. The average difference is not applicable here.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
If we set up a capital management, LLC as an investment adviser in IB in US, how much corporate tax do we need to pay?
Could we set up the same company in IB in some tax havens? Thanks.
LLC is a pass through entity: it does not pay any tax.
It is a misconception that one needs to incorporate in a tax haven to avoid US tax on a fund or management company.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
So adviser will pay US personal income tax? Thanks.
That depends on if the members are US residents or citizens. Please consult greentradertax.com
Ernie
Hi Ernie.
Are your presentaions on A.I and Portfolio Optimization (Kelly formula) from the Q-Trade Bootcamp available please ?
Nick
nk@mintegration.eu
BTW - see you tomorrow at the Meetup.
Hi Ernie,
Can a US financial advisor take clients who are not US residents?
Thanks.
Hi Nick,
Please follow @QTradeBootcamp on Twitter. They will announce when the presentations will be available on their e-learning platform.
See you tomorrow!
Ernie
Yes, US financial advisors can definitely take on non-US clients.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Some job ads that I've seen require quant traders with a sharpe ratio of at least 3. Do you think that is a realistic expectation? How common is that kind of performance?
Many thanks,
Peter
Hi Peter,
It is not difficult to get a backtest with Sharpe ratio of 3, it is very difficult to get that in live trading over, say, 3 years, unless one is a high frequency trader.
Focusing on Sharpe ratio wholly overlooks the hidden tail risks. It preference mean reversion strategies over momentum strategies for no rational reason. It is, in short, a very unwise selection criterion. If a trading firm advertises such preference, you know it is run by amateurs.
Ernie
Hi Ernie, Your last comment is interesting - if one did have a way of generating momentum strategies - any selection scheme even indirectly influenced by a Sharpe ratio will prefer mean reversion strategies over those. Can a mean/recent_drawdown estimate work better in this selection?
Thanks,
-RB
Hi RB,
One can use Calmar ratio to select strategies. Then mean reversion strategies won't be favored over momentum ones.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
If you find a strategy that works, do you always want to have a reasonable economic story behind it?
Or if you find a statistical pattern that is robust across asset classes, time, and geographical markets, would you still trade it even if it is impossible to come up with an explanation?
Thanks
I typically prefer to have an economic story behind it, so that I know when it stops working, whether it is due to noise or whether the fundamentals have changed and I should just discontinue it.
However, I also hear Bob Mercer over at Renaissance Technologies said that one of his best strategies has no fundamental basis whatsoever, and because it seems so arbitrary, no one else trades it and therefore it remains profitable throughout the years.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
A question regarding construction of strategies. It seems like if I make my strategy beta-neutral, it will not be zero cost. And if I make my strategy zero cost, it will not be beta neutral. How do I make my strategy both cash and beta neutral?
The short answer is: you can't.
But then, a small net exposure won't harm you either way!
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
I know that sharpe ratio is constant with leverage. But is it true that calmar ratio will not be constant with leverage?
Many thanks,
Peter
Hi Peter,
Calmar ratio involves the calculation of cumulative compound returns. Compound returns are not proportional to leverage. The numerator and denominator do not involve the same compound returns. Hence the ratio is dependent on leverage.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Everyone says that Sharpe ratios should only by computed on zero-cost portfolios, i.e. on excess returns. Why is that?
/Samuel
Hi Samuel,
Sharpe ratio measures risk-adjusted returns over and above the return on cash (i.e. cash is the benchmark). Hence we must subtract the risk-free-rate which is the return on cash. Equivalently, you can long the securities and short (borrow) the cash.
If your portfolio is long only, then you should use information ratio, which uses a different benchmark (SPX? NDX? Some bond index?) return which you should subtract from.
Ernie
Hi Samuel,
I should also clarify that if your portfolio is zero-cost, that means you don't need to short cash, and you won't need to subtract the risk-free rate from the returns in computing Sharpe ratio.
Ernie
Ernie,
Thanks for your replies.
As I understand it, a futures contract is a zero-cost instrument. Returns on a fully collateralized futures position can be written as an excess return.
Hence, we can simply use Sharpe ratios for any strategy that involves futures. Correct?
Thanks a lot for your help.
/Samuel
Hi Samuel,
You can use Sharpe ratio for any portfolios. The only issue is whether the portfolio is zero-cost, in which case you don't need to subtract risk-free-rate from your returns. A futures portfolio is zero-cost, and risk free rate need not be subtracted.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
I have a strategy where I every day take positions and hold them for three days. Which way is correct to compute returns?
1.ret(t+3)=sum(weight_t .* (prices(t+3,:)./prices(t,:)-1), 2)
2.ret(t+1:t+3)=ret(t+1:t+3)+sum(repmat(weight_t,3,1).*(prices(t+1:t+3,:)./prices(t:t+2)-1),2)
In 1), returns are basically rolling three day returns for every new position taken.
In 2), daily returns are computed for a fixed weight vector even though you only realise the return after three days. I have ret(t+1:t+3) on the right hand side of the equality sign since there are overlapping positions taken every day.
Which way is correct?
Thanks!
Neither way is correct, but the second way is more wrong.
In both ways, you are assuming that the capital allocation to each "stock" is constant - but unless you actively rebalance the positions at the end of each day, that won't be true. You need to specify shares instead of market value weights to compute returns.
The second way is more wrong because the (net) returns cannot be added - they need to be compounded like (1+r1)*(1+r2)-1. If you want to add, you have to use log returns instead.
Ernie
Thanks for your reply Ernie.
I see why the second way is more wrong. Do you have a code example in your latest book that takes this into account?
As I pointed out above, the cumulative returns of r(t), r(t+1), ..., r(t+n) should be written as prod((1+r(t:t+n))-1. You can decide how each r(i) is to be computed.
Ernie
Thanks Ernie for all the sharing.
As a starter I found that the biggest challenge is to find a reasonably cheap market data source, given that I have no profitable strategy to fund it initially. Thanks for the link I will check it out and see if it is applicable to myself.
Without the 1ms before close data, do you think we can use a probabilistic approach to estimate a worse case scenario?
Hi Paul,
If you fund a small account at IB, they will give you free market data.
You don't need to test with auction data in the beginning - just find a profitable strategy with consolidated data first and then verify with paper trading on IB.
I don't think you need to waste time with probabilistic approach to get around the auction data issue: it won't be right in any case.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Coming back to the question above about computing returns for overlapping portfolios. Just to make sure I understand.
So if you have a holding period of k days and you take new overlapping positions every day, you would suggest to use number of shares instead of portfolios weights?
That is, track the number of shares for each security together with overall implied market value of the portfolio to compute implied portfolios weights each period?
Thanks,
Samuel
Hi Samuel,
Yes, if you don't want to rebalance your portfolio everyday, that's what you have to do.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
you said that the best way to get historical FX data is asking your broker for it. Are you able to download historical FX data from IB? And do you need to use the TWS API in order to do get this data?
Regards
MT
Hi MT,
Sure, we did download IB's FX data, but one can only do that via their API.
Ernie
Hi again Ernie,
Many academic papers I read compute turnover as sum(abs(w_t - w_t-1)).
But doesn't this ignore the change in w_t-1 over the period?
A more correct approach seems to be instead of using w_t-1 one should use:
(w_t-1 *(1+r_i))/(1+r_p)
where r_i is the return on security i and r_p is the return on the overall portfolio.
This also means that instead of using number of shares, one can update weights on existing positions with the above expression.
Is this reasoning correct?
/Samuel
Hi Samuel,
If w_t represents the number of shares of a stock, then indeed the turnover is abs(w_t-w_t-1), but then you need to multiply by the price p_t to compute the turnover in $. If w_t represents market value, then this expression is incorrect.
Turnover is used to measure transaction cost. Your second expression is incorrect because the growth of market value due solely to market movement does not incur transaction cost.
Ernie
Ernie,
Referring to your last paragraph. Say my signal suggests a portfolio weight of 0.60 for security i at time t-1. If security i has a higher return than your overall portfolio return over the period t-1:t then its weight has increased to say 0.65.
Now suppose your signal at time t+1 suggests a weight of 0.60 again. Then my turnover at t+1 using portfolio weights will be sum(abs(0.60-0.65)).
So in this case, the growth in the market value of the stock leads to turnover at t+1 for any signal weight different than 0.65.
Hi Samuel,
In this case, the target weight is w(t-1)*(1+r_p), as you want your stock's weight to grow at same rate as the portfolio so its relative allocation is unchanged. But before rebalancing, the actual weight is w(t-1)*(1+r_i). (Assume throughout that w is the market value.)
Hence the turnover in $ is abs(w(t-1)*(r_p-r_i)).
Makes sense?
Ernie
Ernie
before rebalancing, the actual weight is
w(t-1)*(1+r_i)/(1+r_p). Ie the performance of the stock vs the overall portfolio.
I get exactly the same backtest result if i use number of shares as we first discuss or this updating of portfolio weights.
samuel
Samuel,
Maybe I don't understand fully what you are doing, or your notations.
If a position has market value w(t-1), and its return from t-1 to t is r_i, how can it not be the case that the actual weight at t before rebalancing is w(t-1)*(1+r_i)?
Ernie
Ernie,
My portfolio weight w(t-1) = value of a stock(t-1) / portfolio value(t-1)
/Samuel
Samuel,
OK, then we agree.
Ernie
OK, great. Thanks for your patience.
I find it a neat way of updating daily returns when for example your rebalancing period is monthly.
/Samuel
Thanks for sharing a great information.
Hi Ernie,
You earlier alluded that it is not possible to make a portfolio both dollar neutral and beta neutral at the same time. Could you please expand on this? I don't see why, given that I have enough weights to satisfy the constraints.
Thanks,
Samuel
Hi Samuel,
Yes, I stand corrected. If you have many stocks you can indeed optimize your portfolio under both constraints.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
OK, great. Thanks for clarifying.
/Samuel
Hi again Ernie,
Sorry for bothering you with yet another question but I find this stuff interesting :)
When constructing a continuous futures series, I know a popular method is backwards ratio adjustment. Just want make sure: There is no look-ahead bias arising from this right? I guess you only change the level of the entire series so returns should be unaffected. Is this correct reasoning?
Thanks,
Samuel
Hi Samuel,
There is a possibility of minor look-ahead bias with back-adjustment, which is why many professionals prefer not to use continuous adjusted futures series for backtesting.
Ernie
Interesting. Could you please expand on possible sources of bias and how professionals mitigate them?
Thanks,
Samuel
Hi Sam,
Backadjustment in futures means using the future price to adjust past prices: clearly there is a look-ahead bias. The way to remove this bias is to use the actual contracts to backtest, and manage the roll over to the next contract by buying/selling on the rollover day.
Ernie
Hi Ernie -
Apologies my question is not related to your post.
I want to hear your thoughts on neural networks. I know the quant-trading community has traditional dismissed NN as too black-box. But with recent developments in DNN, the field has furthered its understanding around network topology, alternative response functions, efficient ways to train large networks, etc.
Do you think this could potentially be a powerful tool for recognizing patterns from the financial market? And yes what type of frequenties/asset classes would it be most suitable?
Thanks very much,
David
Hi Ernie
I have been following your blog. I dont think there is a look ahead bias when using for example backwards ratio adjustment of futures. You just shift the level of the price up and down which does not matter if you work with returns.
Hi David,
NN requires a large amount of data to avoid overfitting financial data. Hence it may be useful in high frequency trading.
Ernie
If you back-adjust futures prices by eliminating the return gap during rollover, you will create a price gap, and vice versa. There is no way to avoid both, and so both cases involve look-ahead bias. Hence professional futures traders stick to actual contract prices.
Ernie
Hello Erine
I'm reading your book, at Page 14, you mentioned of continuous future contracts for arb trading.
You said : If your strategy generates trading signals based on the
price difference between two contracts, then you must choose the price
back-adjustment method; otherwise, the price difference may be wrong and
generate a wrong trading signal..... However, if your strategy generates trading signals based on the ratio of prices between two contracts, then you must choose the return
back-adjustment method"
But, after reading what you replied above, saying that professional futures traders stick to actual contract to backtest, and manage the roll over to the next contract by buying/selling on the rollover day.
I'm a little bit confused of what should be the correct method to backtest, Let say I have 3 years data of future contract of commodity A and commodity B, and the data shows that Feb and August are the active contracts for both of A and B usually. Therefore I pick 2012 Feb, 2012 Aug, 2013 Feb, 2013 Aug, and 2014 Feb, 2014 Aug for commodity A , same for commodity B for backtesting
Based on what you mentioned above, I shouldn't do any back-adjustment of the return series from A and B before applying any ADF, johansen Test to it? Please kindly advise. Thank You
Karen
Hi Karen,
If you have generated a vector of trading signals (buys or sells), you should use actual contract prices to determine the returns based on these trading signals.
But in generating a trading signal at time t, you can back-adjust futures for all time t' <= t to create a continuous contract. In particular, if you want to run a Johansen test on spreads of different futures, the backadjustment should involve only additions. If your signal is generated based on ratio of prices, the backadjustment should involve only multiplications.
Ernie
Ernie,
thanks for the blog and information. About the 'CEF Premium Reversion' strategy I wonder if you have an explanation why the different price changes the outcome significantly? I understand that the price is different but why does it result in a disadvantage, in particular when you trade long and short positions?
Thanks, Niels
Hi Niels,
Any "white" data noise always inflates the returns of a mean-reversion strategy. (See explanation on p. 10 of my book Algorithmic Trading.) In fact, white noise is the best kind of noise for mean reversion. Consolidated stock/ETF/CEF data suffers from white noise, while primary exchange data does not.
Ernie
Ernie,
thanks so much for your quick reply! Now this makes sense and the book chapter helped.
Hi Ernie,
It seems like a discussion on mechanism of order matching. Though low-frequency data like day bar or month bar we backtest, matching a deal through tick data is a necessity. Correct?
Hi Sqrt Alpha,
I don't exactly know what you meant by order or deal matching. My instinct tells me that my article isn't about what you are thinking.
Ernie
Ernie, I see your point on figuring out the correct open and closing prices in order to conduct a proper backtest. This is where I wanna make a suggestion of forgetting ohlc data, I find liquidity way more important of an issue unless you only trade 100 share or 1 contract positions. Volume based bars or tick bars which are constructed off 1min may be a little better.
As an example you would trade 500 share bars, and if you need to execute at open you would take the worst price of the range or median price of 1000share bar range as your price of execution.(latter is better because in reality even if you tried to execute this 500 share trade you wouldn't have been able to within first bars range because that would assume you were only buyer).My point is all these back tests are pointless without tick data - period.
slav
Hi Slav,
Yes, your idea for using a volume bar at the open is certainly a good alternative of using the official open price, which often has limited size. However, even though that auction size is limited, it isn't quite limited to 100 shares. You can typically trade at least $200K to $500K order depending on the market cap of the stock without moving the auction price.
Ernie
Hi, I'm following your book codes (strategy "Buy on Gap" pg.93-96) on Matlab but as I'm using the 2016 version I had to rearrange some of your old functions (i.e "lagmatrix" instead of "lag" and "tsmovavg" + "movstd" instead of your personal functions for moving averages and moving standard deviations").
Anyway...I honestly find very different results from yours even if using the very same data!
Another thing I noticed is it seems you're not following your own conditions: for example:
1) You calculate 90 days moving average for daily returns (close to close) and say that we have to consider only (today open/yesterday low) returns < than the 1 standard deviation from 90 days movaverages just computed. But...in your code you make the previous day low - 1 standard deviation. Isn't it wrong??
2)in the second condition you say that today low must be < than 20 days mov.average of closing prices. So, why in the code I read ma= moving average of close to close returns????
Please, I hope you can help me as I'm just a newbie matlab user and I really love to follow your work. Thanks
Hi anon,
1) The buyPrice was indeed set to backshift(1, lo).*(1-entryZscore*stdretC2C90d);
But note the condition
hasData=find(isfinite(retGap(t, :)) & op(t, :) < buyPrice(t, :) & op(t, :) > ma(t, :));
So only those days with op < buyPrice will be used.
2) Indeed "open prices to be higher than the 20-day moving average of the closing prices. "
and ma is computed as ma=backshift(1, smartMovingAvg(cl, lookback));
Note ma is NOT computed as moving average of returns. It is computed as moving average of close prices.
Ernie
Thanks for your reply!
Yes you're right about the point 2): the moving average is computed over closing prices and not return (sorry yesterday I was clearly done with my mind!!).
The point "1" instead...I'm still not sure about it: Shouldn't it be: retgap < stdretC2C90d? Anyway, I'll work on it.
The real problem is (for the previous and future strategies I'll read on the book) working with different versions of Matlab (as I can't use any longer function as "lag" etc.) but I thought I managed to change functions in a way to get close to your results. I was clearly wrong (my Sharpe Ratio is only 0,63 compared to your 1,5 and my APR 0,0048 instead of 8,7%!!!). I don't know where, but I've failed into coding. So, is there by any chance, an update version of this book's Matlab code?
Thank again for your attention and your patience!
Beppe
Hi Beppe,
I believe you can substitute op(t, :) < buyPrice(t, :) with retgap < -stdretC2C90d, but note the minus sign.
The function lag is in spatial-econometrics.com which you can download for free. But lag(x) can be substituted by backshift(1, x), and backshift is a function from epchan.com/book2.
Matlab is mostly backward compatible. If you find a piece of code doesn't work, most likely it is because you need to download some utility functions from my website or from spatial-econometrics.com.
Ernie
Believe it or not, I made the same changes before your reply!!!
Well...to be honest, "almost" the same: I forgot the "minus" sign. Ironically I got a far better APR (more than 20%) while Sharpe almost equal. Unfortunately I still have values too far from yours. It's clear that depends on functions and by some changes I made. No problem, I think for the moment it's more important understand the "meaning" of a strategy. So now I can go on with the book.
Now my very last question:
"retO2C=(cl-op)./op;
pnl=sum(positionTable.*(retO2C), 2);
ret=pnl/topN;"
You sum returns for every day in order to have a final column vector pnl. It's all ok but...summing percentages from different prices shouldn't require us to multiply these percentages for the opening prices? I mean, that way we have the absolute value we're really gaining/loosing. Or maybe I'm doing confusion because I don't even understand why dividing for 10.
Anyway, I abused of your patience so thanks again for your help.
Beppe,
Yes, my total returns are an arithmetic sum, not a compound return. This is useful for Sharpe ratio calculation, or if the trader wants to bet a fixed amount of capital each day.
However, even if you were to compute compound return, it isn't correct to multiply the price with the returns. They are totally different animals. Compound return formula would be just cumret=cumprod(1+retO2C)-1.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Are you saying that open/close prices are different on yahoo or google than they are on Bloomberg HP page? Is this just the case in the US? In your second example is 5bps an accurate assumption of trading costs, did you find there was any market impact, has it continued to perform well 3 years later?
Many thanks
Ben
Hi Ben,
Yes, prices on Yahoo and Google *may* differ from that on Bloomberg IF you select the primary exchange prices on Bloomberg. Not all prices on all stocks differ every day, but they do occasionally for some stocks.
This is applicable only to US exchanges. I cannot speak for other exchanges.
5 bps is a reasonable cost estimates for S&P 500 stocks. It is difficult to measure market impact on open and close prices. I haven't backtested this strategy recently, so I don't know if it continued to perform well.
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
Thanks for the great article. I also attended the online meetup where you gave this presentation back in 2015.
I have developed and backtested two equity strategies, but do not yet have any trading experience with stocks.
You mention above that 5bps is a reasonable cost estimate for S&P 500 stocks, and I have seen this figure in various other places. I am trying to understand where this estimate is coming from?
If once uses MOC or MOO orders as in your first two examples, then we "avoid paying the bid-ask spread". I checked the exchange transaction fees at:
https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/markets/nyse/NYSE_Price_List.pdf
and at $0.0004/share for Tier 1 stocks, this will typically be much less than 1bps. The commission fees at IB are also per share, and I believe are also well under 1bps. Is this 5bps cost estimate taking into account market impact? If so, shouldn't this be a function of the amounts being traded?
James
Hi James,
Sorry for the late reply ... I just saw this sitting in my Inbox.
5bps is the typical commission + half-spread of a SP500 stock. If you are trading small caps, it could be 4 times larger.
As my article suggests, the posted Closing price is often not the same as the true auction price you will get filled MOC. So in effect we still have to allow for half-spread to account for the difference.
Ernie
You don't need such data .. you just have to think a bit more how to use your 1 min data, a little bit of creativity saves many many hours of over doing things.
Anon,
While most official closing prices in US stocks will be close to the mid price of the minute bars at the close, they don't match exactly.
There are not many hours of overdoing things: either you have the official prices, or you don't. You just have to pay for it (from Bloomberg for e.g.)
Ernie
Hi Ernie,
For those of us requiring less granularity in our data (EOD futures data), how do you like Kinetick (DTN IQ)? You list a number of data providers across your 3 books, but this is not one of them.
Hi Mark,
Generally, we like IQFeed / DTN's data feed.
Ernie
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