#20 – Volatility Risk Premium Effect

Authors: Israelov, Nielsen

Title: Still Not Cheap: Portfolio Protection in Calm Markets

Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2579232

Abstract:

Recent equity volatility is near all-time lows. Option prices are also low. Many analysts suggest this represents a good opportunity to purchase put options for portfolio insurance. It is well-known that portfolio insurance is expensive on average, but what about in calm markets? History suggests it still is. We investigate the relationship between option richness and volatility across ten global equity indices. Option prices may be low, but their expected values tend to be even lower.

Notable quotations from the academic research paper:

…

#21 – Momentum Effect in Commodities
#22 – Term Structure Effect in Commodities

Authors: Bakshi, Bakshi, Rossi

Title: Understanding the Sources of Risk Underlying the Cross-Section of Commodity Returns

Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2589057

Abstract:

We show that a model featuring an average commodity factor, a carry factor, and a momentum factor is capable of describing the cross-sectional variation of commodity returns. More parsimonious one- and two-factor models that feature only the average and/or carry factors are rejected. To provide an economic interpretation, we show that innovations in equity volatility can price portfolios formed on carry with a negative risk premium, while innovations in our measure of speculative activity can price portfolios formed on momentum with a positive risk premium. Furthermore, we characterize the relation of the factors with the investment opportunity set.

Notable quotations from the academic research paper:

…

Dear visitors,

We have launched a new subpage on Quantpedia.com which will contain master lists of tools for quantitative traders. We have started with a comprehensive lists of backtesting software and historical data sources:

http://quantpedia.com/Links/Backtesters
http://quantpedia.com/Links/HistoricalData

We have a good responses on them so far therefore I hope you will find them helpful too. Let us know if you are missing some source in our list, we will add it there.

The QUANTPEDIA Team

#5 – FX Carry Trade

Authors: Maurer, To, Tran

Title: Pricing Risks Across Currency Denominations

Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2589545

Abstract:

Investors based in different countries earn different returns on same strategies because the same risks covary differently with countries' stochastic discount factors (SDFs). We document that investors in low-interest-rate countries earn more than those in high-interest-rate countries on identical carry trade strategies. We propose a novel econometric procedure to estimate country-specific SDFs from foreign exchange market data. We provide out-of-sample evidence that (i) a country's interest rate is inversely related to its SDF volatility, (ii) output gap fluctuations across countries strongly correlate with estimated SDFs, and (iii) our estimated SDFs explain half of the risk in equity markets as measured by priced equity premia.

Notable quotations from the academic research paper:

…

#21 – Momentum Effect in Commodities
#22 – Term Structure Effect in Commodities

Authors: Zaremba

Title: Strategies Based on Momentum and Term Structure in Financialized Commodity Markets

Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2469407

Abstract:

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of the financialization of commodity markets on the profitability of strategies based on momentum and term structure. The performance of an array of portfolios from double-sorts on non-commercial traders’ participation, historical returns and term spreads is tested against a risk model. Both strategies reveal better performance in case of commodity markets with low financialization level and generate little profits in the markets with a significant participation of investors. The findings of this study can be used for the purposes of tactical and strategic asset allocation.

Notable quotations from the paper:

…

#12 – Pairs Trading with Stocks

Authors: Xie, Liew, Wu, Zou

Title: Pairs Trading with Copulas

Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2383185

Abstract:

Pairs trading is a well-acknowledged speculative investment strategy that is widely used in the financial markets, and distance method is the most commonly implemented pairs trading strategy by traders and hedge funds. However, this approach, which can be seen as a standard linear correlation analysis, is only able to fully describe the dependency structure between stocks under the assumption of multivariate normal returns. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new pairs trading strategy using copula modeling technique. Copula allows separate estimation of the marginal distributions of stock returns as well as their joint dependency structure. Thus, the proposed new strategy, which is based on the estimated optimal dependency structure and marginal distributions, can identify relative undervalued or overvalued positions with more accuracy and confidence. Hence, it is deemed to generate more trading opportunities and profits. A simple one-pair-one-cycle example is used to illustrate the advantages of the proposed method. Besides, a large sample analysis using the utility industry data is provided as well. The overall empirical results have verified that the proposed strategy can generate higher profits compared with the conventional distance method. We argue that the proposed trading strategy can be considered as a generalization of the conventional pairs trading strategy.

Notable quotations from the paper:

…