Inflation is one of the key macroeconomic forces shaping financial markets, influencing asset prices across the board. In our previous analysis, we examined how gold and Treasury prices react to changes in the inflation rate, uncovering patterns that suggested inflation dynamics also impact the US dollar. In this follow-up, we shift our focus entirely to the dollar, analyzing how it responds to both accelerating and decelerating inflation. As the world’s reserve currency, the dollar’s movements have far-reaching implications, affecting global trade, monetary policy, and asset allocation. Our goal is to determine whether inflation serves as a clear driver of dollar performance and, if so, in what ways.

Navigating the financial markets requires a keen understanding of risk sentiment, and one often-overlooked dataset that provides valuable insights is FINRA’s margin debt statistics. Reported monthly, these figures track the total debit balances in customers’ securities margin accounts—a key proxy for speculative activity in the market. Since margin accounts are heavily used for leveraged trades, shifts in margin debt levels can signal changes in overall risk appetite. Our research explores how this dataset can be leveraged as a market timing tool for US stock indexes, enhancing traditional trend-following strategies that rely solely on price action. Given the current uncertainty surrounding Trump’s presidency, margin debt data could serve as a warning system, helping investors distinguish between market corrections and deeper bear markets.

Inflation significantly impacts the prices of gold and treasury bonds through various mechanisms. Gold is often viewed as a hedge against inflation, while treasury bonds exhibit a more complex relationship influenced by interest rates and investor behavior. This relationship between inflation, gold, and treasuries is well understood, but the real question is whether we can systematically capitalize on it. In this article, we explore how inflation data can be used to build trading strategies—and as our findings suggest, the answer is a definite yes.

Can we truly rely on the opening price in OHLC data for backtesting? While the overnight drift effect is well-documented in equities, we investigated its presence in gold using the GLD ETF and then extended our analysis to the GDX – Gold Miners ETF, where we observed an unusually strong overnight return exceeding 30% annualized. However, when we tested execution at 9:31 AM using 1-minute data, the anomaly diminished significantly, suggesting that the extreme return was partially a data artifact. This finding highlights the risks of blindly trusting OHLC open prices and underscores the need for higher-frequency data to validate execution assumptions.

Building upon the established research on market seasonality and the potential for front-running to boost associated profits, this article investigates the application of seasonal strategies within the context of crisis hedge portfolios. Unlike traditional asset allocation strategies that may falter during market stress, crisis hedge portfolios are designed to provide downside protection. We examine whether incorporating seasonal timing into these portfolios can enhance their performance and return-to-risk ratios, potentially offering superior risk-adjusted returns compared to static or non-seasonal approaches.

Ever thought about investing in cryptocurrencies? Before diving in, it’s worth understanding the shadowy practice of wash trading, where fake trade volumes distort the market. Our latest blog explores how this manipulation impacts major assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, the methods used to detect it, and why regulatory clarity is key to a more trustworthy crypto ecosystem.