The problem of missing financial data is widespread yet often overlooked. An interesting insight into the structure of missing financial data provides a novel research paper by authors Bryzgalova et al. (2022). Firstly, examining the dataset of the 45 most popular characteristics in asset pricing, the authors found that missing data is frequent among almost any characteristic and affects all kinds of firms – small, large, young, mature, profitable, or in financial distress. The requirement of multiple characteristics simultaneously makes the problem even worse. Moreover, the data is not missing randomly; missing values clusters both cross-sectionally and over time. This may lead to a selection bias, making most famous ad-hoc approaches like the median invalid. Considering the abovementioned findings, the authors propose a novel imputation method based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA).

Cryptocurrencies are an asset class that isn’t easy to ignore in the modern world. In February 2023, the crypto market capitalization was at around $1.1 trillion, which is roughly half of the value of all U.S. notes and coins in circulation. With their properties quite different from other investment options, it might prove useful to an investor to understand and navigate this market well.  The authors Campbell R. Harvey, Tarek Abou Zeid, Teun Draaisma, Martin Luk, Henry Neville, Andre Rzym, and Otto Van Hemert in their paper An Investor’s Guide to Crypto (July, 2022), offer an overview surely interesting for anyone willing to enter this market.

Cryptocurrencies are a high-risk and very speculative asset class that, from being used only by tech geeks worldwide, spread from small retail craziness of early adopters to institutional adoption and mainstream. Some claim it to be a world-changing concept with the utilization of blockchain (databases) and smart contracts that open a wide range of opportunities, from decentralizing finance to self-governing algorithms; some others point to unnecessary scams, money laundering, and bubbles. We have been covering the concepts and topics relating to crypto extensively. This article will continue our investigation of this interesting field. We would like to test how the price action looks around some of the events unique to the cryptocurrency world – namely the Bitcoin reward halvings and hard and soft forks in Bitcoin and Ethereum networks.

The US dollar is the world’s primary reserve currency, is the most widely traded currency in the world (making up over 85% of all foreign exchange transactions), and is used as the benchmark currency for pricing many commodities such as oil and gold. We can say that the US dollar is the blood of the current financial system. A few months ago, we shared how to build a really long-term (nearly 100 years long) history of the USD exchange rate. Therefore, as we already have the data, we can now perform the cross-asset analysis to study the impact of the US Dollar’s strength or weakness on the performance of other asset classes, notably US equities, US treasury bonds, and commodities.

Hello all,

What have we accomplished in the last month?

– One new Quantpedia Pro report – the Rebalancing Analysis
– 9 new Quantpedia Premium strategies have been added to our database
– 10 new related research papers have been included in existing Premium strategies during the last month
– Additionally, we have produced 9 new backtests written in QuantConnect code
– And finally, 5+1 new blog posts that you may find interesting have been published on our Quantpedia blog in the previous month

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are incredibly versatile investment vehicles. They have become more popular in recent years as investors have grown more comfortable with passive investing strategies. But ETFs can be very useful also in active trading strategies, as they can be used to gain exposure to specific markets, sectors, or themes. But when you invest in ETFs or trade them regularly; it’s really good to look under the hood and learn some tricks where to obtain a new source of alpha. And one such possible source or information advantage may be the possibility of analyzing the ETF flows data …