The global pandemic of current scope is something that was experienced by only a few living people. We have some historical accounts of how it unfolded in the past, but otherwise, it is uncharted territory. It is a true Black Swan event – event that I believe was in nobody’s lineup of stress testing scenarios. But we can still try to get some understanding of the scope of the current situation.

The actual global crisis is a mix of 2 crisis. The first one is the health-care / pandemic crisis, during which millions of people will be infected, and unfortunately, a lot of them will die. The second crisis is the economic crisis/recession, which will follow simultaneously with (or soon after) the first one (due to the decrease in worldwide supply and demand).

The second crisis cannot end before the first one is solved. We cannot exactly say when the market bottom will occur, but at least we can try to model the minimum time needed for things to get under control during the pandemic.

One of the very often promoted attributes of Bitcoin is said to be its “safe heaven” characteristic. Some cryptocurrency proponents advocate that Bitcoin can be used as a store of value mainly during the economic and financial crisis. We argue that it’s not so.

Bitcoin (and all cryptocurrencies too) is, in our opinion, fundamentally more similar to stocks of small companies from the technological sector. It is a very speculative bet on blockchain technology. It may seem unrelated to the broader equity market (like the S&P 500 index) during normal times. But when a stressful time comes, investors are more concerned to meet a deadline for the next mortgage payment. This is the time when the speculative bets are closed, and cash is raised. And this is precisely the time when Bitcoin falls as equities do too.

Financial markets are in panic mode. Everybody is talking about the next bear market and economic implications of spreading coronavirus to the whole world. People are split into two groups. One group reasons that a new covid-19 virus is just a stronger flu. Other are worried and draw parallels to Spanish flu pandemic with tens of millions of dead.

We would like to show you two charts which can explain why the high market volatility can be completely rational.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what’s the best factor model of them all? We at Quantpedia are probably not the only one asking this question. A lot of competing factor models are described in the academic literature and used in practice. That’s the reason why we consider a new research paper written by Matthias Hanauer really valuable. He compared several commonly employed factor models across non-U.S. developed and emerging market countries and answered the question from the beginning of this paragraph. Which model seems the winner? The six-factor model proposed in Barillas et al. (2019) that substitutes the classic value factor in the Fama and French (2018) six-factor model for a monthly updated value factor …

Authors: Hanauer

Title: A Comparison of Global Factor Models

Dear readers,

Four new Quantpedia Premium strategies have been added into our database, and five new related research papers have been included in existing Premium strategies during last month. Plus, I am happy to announce that we have expanded our team of analysts and starting in March, we plan to more than double our rate of research. Our plan is to add around 100 new strategies derived out of academic research until the end of 2020.

Additionally, we have produced 19 new backtests written in QuantConnect code. Our database currently contains 245 strategies with out-of-sample backtests/codes.