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…
Category: Macro
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, 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.…
Macro
Trading what’s priced in
by Saeed Amen •
If I go to the Burger King (for some reason it sounds better that way, by including the ‘the’), I kind of know what I’ll get. The burger, will likely be a Whopper. Whether I’m in London or New York, the whole Burger King experience is likely to be very similar. The burger should taste…
General, Macro
Correlations and the market
by Saeed Amen •
When I have a burger I feel better. I feel that there is some causation here, in particular because of I’ve got lots of statistical data to justify this! However, in practice, if we look away from burgers and at finance, it’s a bit more difficult to answer the conundrum of causation versus correlation. If…
Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
Fooled by randomness?
by Saeed Amen •
Nassim Talib’s book entitled Fooled by Randomness, is a great read. The central premise is the idea that people mistake randomness for something meaningful. We always want to find an explanation or a cause for something, even if there isn’t one. Markets are inherently noisy. It isn’t always possible to understand “why” a market moved…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Macro, Python
Hundreds of quant papers/libraries from #QuantLinkADay
by Saeed Amen •
I tweet a lot, perhaps too much. The question is always what shall I tweet about? Sometimes it’s about burgers, other times it’ll be some puns or there might even be some vastly impressive observation in a tweet I make (well, perhaps not, but we can always hope!). Over the past 2 years, to give me…
Data, Foreign Exchange, Macro
The right type of market forecast
by Saeed Amen •
Every so often when I was working in a bank, someone would ring up, and ask me what our 5 year EUR/USD forecast was. Trying to create such a long term “forecast” is indeed very difficult. One way is to use a valuation model such as PPP, which attempts to gauge long term fair value.…
Data, General, Macro
The gorilla & Radiohead in the backtest room
by Saeed Amen •
A couple of years ago I remember visiting the opening of an art exhibition in Amsterdam, with a few of my friends from university. I can’t really recall many of the paintings, probably more a function of my memory, rather than the art itself. One thing I do recall was a painting a living room,…
General, Macro
Isn’t passive, a bit active?
by Saeed Amen •
Over the past few years, passive strategies have increased significantly in popularity compared to active strategies. This is perhaps not surprising given that stocks have been pretty buoyant and as a result passive strategies which track a broad based equity indices have performed relatively well. The argument is that passive strategies have very low fees…