What is crowdsourcing? If we ask Wikipedia, it tells us that it “is a sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods and services. These services include ideas and finances, from a large, relatively open and often rapidly-evolving group of internet users; it divides work between participants to achieve a cumulative result.” Within a trading context, how…
Category: Data
Data, General
Data, trend following and more
by Saeed Amen •
One of the historical bedrocks of many quant funds, in particular those known as CTAs, has been trend following strategies. Funds such as Winton have largely been known as trend followers. Recently Risk.net published an interview with David Harding, the founder of Winton (link here and it’s well worth reading), alongside some of their thoughts. Harding…
Data, General
Where does alternative data fit in?
by Saeed Amen •
I often get asked about where alternative data can be used during the investment process. In practice, I think the key point about alternative data, is that it isn’t an “alternative” to traditional data sources. Furthermore, very often you want to combine various alternative data sources together to generate a signal. This also means combining…
Data, Foreign Exchange, Macro
Want to use machine readable news to trade?
by Saeed Amen •
Before the written word, information flow was severely limited. Whatever, wasn’t in human memory was basically lost. To use a computing parallel, it was as if everything was in volatile memory. By constant, having the written word, meant we could store words on long term storage mediums, such as stone, later paper and now digitally.…
Data
Cleaning data for trading
by Saeed Amen •
Nobody likes doing the boring stuff. We all want to go on holiday, but packing our bags is not the fun bit. We all want to have a nice burger (well, I do), but queuing for ages at an ever popular burger joint is not what we want. Traders all want to have positive P&L,…
Data, Events, Foreign Exchange, Python
QuantCon NYC 2018 review
by Saeed Amen •
John Fawcett, founder of Quantopian with Rich Newman, FactSet A big reason people visit New York is for the burgers, right? You’ve got Shake Shack, Minetta Tavern, the Burger Joint… I could construct quite a long list. OK, that’s probably just a reason which encourages me to visit New York! At the end of…
Data
Gauging how useful alternative data is
by Saeed Amen •
Hands up, if you’ve heard the words “alternative data” being used in quant circles recently? I can see a lot of hands up! I could ask the same questions for machine learning and artificial intelligence, and probably get the same reaction. The crux of any good trading strategy is using data as an input and…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General
At the chart of the matter & finding market patterns
by Saeed Amen •
I recently retweeted a link to a rather interesting tutorial on machine learning given by Google. One of my Twitter followers (@grodaeu) replied ‘totally missed opportunity to go “Learn machine learning by taking the same machine learning course 10000 times’. Ok, so I chuckled a bit after reading that reply. However, it did make me…
Data, Foreign Exchange, Python, TCA
Why create an open source FX TCA library?
by Saeed Amen •
The idea of transaction cost analysis (TCA) has been around for years. As the name suggests, it is analysis that can be done to understand how much you are paying for your trading. At its simplest level, it can involve calculating the slippage between the market mid and your executed price. If we are doing FX…
Data, Foreign Exchange, Python
Data for analysing cryptocurrencies
by Saeed Amen •
Currencies have been around for a while. For developed markets we have had freely floating currencies since the 1970s, so you have copious amounts of data to backtest. Many emerging markets currencies also have a reasonable history. There are of course complications, such as different currency regimes, where currencies have been pegged for part of…