A month ago, nobody could expect what March would bring to us. Every person and every company around the world had to turn around its existence completely. That change is still in progress, and we are no exception. The ordinary life of every member of our team has been affected by measures used against coronavirus threat. But we were able to adjust to a new situation flexibly, and we are bringing you your periodical stream of quant research.

We were able to double our rate of research as ten new Quantpedia Premium strategies have been added into our database, and six new related research papers have been included in existing Premium strategies during last month.

Additionally, we have produced 15 new and amended around 20 older backtests written in QuantConnect code. Our database currently contains 260 strategies with out-of-sample backtests/codes.

Also, five new blog posts you may find interesting have been published on our Quantpedia blog. One is about an interesting academic research paper:

Five new strategies have been added.

Three new related research papers have been included into existing strategy reviews. And one short free blog posts has been published during last few weeks.

Markets are in turmoil, and there exist very few investors who are unscathed by current global events related to coronavirus pandemic. It’s a good time to revisit how are various groups of algorithmic trading strategies navigating current troubled times. The selected sample for this short article consists of 7 well-known equity factor strategies – size, value, momentum, quality, investment, short-term reversal and low volatility factors.

Our analysis shows that we have two groups of factors: strong winners and bad losers. There is no middle ground. A current bear market is ruthless, equity long-short factor strategies either totally nailed it and had a stellar performance or totally disappointed.

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.