If you do any sort of analysis of markets, you need market data and related datasets. Without data, you are kind of stuck! There are of course many market datasets which are available to purchase from data vendors. However, what type of datasets are available for free (aside from crypto markets, where there is a…
Category: Data
Data, General, Macro, Python, TCA
New Year’s Quant resolutions
by Saeed Amen •
So this is Christmas / And what have you done? / Another year over / And a new one just begun, as John Lennon once sung. Whilst Christmas is a time to reflect on the past year, the New Year is instead a time to look forward. This may involve New Year’s resolutions, or possibly…
Data, Foreign Exchange, Python, TCA
How to reduce transaction costs when trading FX
by Saeed Amen •
Winter’s coming. Temperature’s dropping. It’s time to swap light jackets with thick coats. Let’s imagine it’s Black Friday tomorrow and you’re in the market for a new coat. You’d probably wait a day just in case it was discounted. Furthermore, you might check the price in a couple of shops. After all, everyone loves a bargain, and…
Data
Point-in-time for your data
by Saeed Amen •
The one thing we really want to know when making trading decisions, is the future! Alas, we don’t have that information! All we do have is information up until the point we actually want to trade, and have to somehow use that to make a prediction about the future price. Ok, this is blatantly obvious…
Data, General, Python
Data science in a database?
by Saeed Amen •
If you have a burger, a pretty important part is the patty. If the patty is awful, the rest of the burger is going to be pretty bad. However, just having good beef is not sufficient. You can overcook it, put too little fat in the patty, and ruin the beef. In a sense, data…
Data, Python
Moving from Matlab to Python
by Saeed Amen •
What’s your favourite burger joint? This is probably the question I get asked most. Perhaps a more relevant question I get asked, is what are the best ways to move from Matlab to Python. For many financial firms, it is a very pertinent question. I used Matlab extensively during my career, particularly when I was…
Data
What does a quant need from alternative data?
by Saeed Amen •
Quants like data, in the same way I like burgers. Quants like to consume data to come up with ways of forecasting the market. The most important dataset is usually market data. However, there are all sorts of other interesting datasets that can be used to help forecast those market prices. In recent years, the area…
Data, General, Macro
Crowdsourcing in markets
by Saeed Amen •
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…
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…