If you see a massive queue around the block outside a restaurant, what does it imply? Well, for one it’s popular. If it’s popular, you’d assume the food is also pretty good. Is this always the case? Sometimes it may well be the case. Other times, it’s simply because of hype, and the food is…
Category: Macro
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
What everyone else is trading
by Saeed Amen •
When visiting a new place, there are a number of ways of deciding where to eat. One way would be to check a website like trip advisor. However, you might feel that this isn’t the best way to research this. Perhaps a more authentic way to find a nice place to eat is to simply…
Data, General, Macro, Python
Hundreds of quant papers from #QuantLinkADay in 2021
by Saeed Amen •
Over the past few years I’ve been tweeting a daily quant paper (or quant related library or similar) every day with the #QuantLinkADay tag. The initial objective was to make sure that my Twitter account @saeedamenfx posted at least some useful quant link of information (and to prevent Twitter followers being overrun by burger tweets,…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
Crypto markets from an FX perspective
by Saeed Amen •
It’s fifty years since the Bretton Woods system collapsed. Given that I’ve been working in FX my whole career, I suspect I should be thankful to Nixon for that! There’s a great article by Chris Marsh which discusses this, and I strongly recommend having a read of it. Also recently I read an article by…
Data, General, Macro
So what can NLP do for financial firms?
by Saeed Amen •
There’s more than one meaning for NLP, which you might encounter. If you Google it, one of these is Neuro Linguistic Programming, and techniques of communicating with other folks. Well this post is absolutely nothing to do that! Instead, it’s to do with the NLP, which occupies more of my time, natural language processing. In…
Data, General, Macro
Quantifying Politics
by Saeed Amen •
We all know that politics impacts markets. However, it can be tricky to understand how to quantify political risk and use it as an input in the investing process. Here we take an updated look at the returns from applying Thorfinn’s political indices to trade a basket of macro assets. During our sample period from…
Data, General, Macro
Forecasting or nowcasting?
by Saeed Amen •
We all want to forecast what’s around the corner? However, perhaps a more pertinent question, which we might seek to ask is the following, is this actually a corner? In a nutshell, that is the difference between forecasting and nowcasting. Forecasting is all very well and good, but it isn’t particularly easy. Nowcasting is more…
Data, General, Macro
Differences between economic and price data
by Saeed Amen •
Price data is usually the first port of call for quants to use in trading strategies. There are many price based strategies which remain popular such as trend following. In general it tends to be easier to start with price data when building models. For one our signal and asset returns can be derived from…
Data, General, Macro
Crypto and quant trading
by Saeed Amen •
There’s probably something innately human about wanting to be right about a prediction. If I get a burger, I especially hope that it’ll be a fantastic burger. Sometimes it is, and I feel a sense of vindication. Other times, maybe not. The downside isn’t exactly a big deal, just a lousy meal, and hopefully, they’ll…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
Markets and their seasons
by Saeed Amen •
Over the past few weeks, spring has arrived, in what has been a very challenging period across many countries in the world. Looking outside, it’s a time of new beginnings, thankfully making a change from the past few months of winter. Markets have their seasons too. Some might actually mirror the actual seasons outside. …