Capturing the systematic premia is the main aim of many quantitative traders. However, investors tend to overlook an important factor when backtesting. Trading costs are an essential part of every trade, and yet even when we consider them, we only use an approximation. The recent article from Angana Jacob (SigTech) looks into how heavily trading costs affect the overall return of various strategies and analyzes multiple ways of implementing trading costs into the trading rules themselves.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and its repercussions continue to occupy front pages all around the world. While using nuclear forces in war is probably a red line for all of the mature world, there is still possible to use nuclear weapons for blackmailing. What will be the impact of such an event on financial markets? It’s not easy to determine, but we tried to identify multiple events in the past which were also slightly unexpected and carried an indication of nuclear threat and then analyzed their impact on financial markets.

The Russia-Ukraine war is a conflict that has not been in Europe since WW2. And it has great implications not only on human lives but also on security prices. It bears numerous characteristics of the cold war crises, where two nuclear powers (Soviet Union and USA/NATO) were often very close to hot war or were waging a proxy war in 3rd countries. We thought it might be wise to look at similar periods from the past to understand what happens in such situations. We selected five events and analyzed the performance of main equity factors (market, HML, SMB, momentum & 2x reversal) and energy and fixed income proxy portfolios.

Factor investors face numerous choices that do not end even after picking the set of factors. For instance, should they neutralize the factor exposure? If the investor pursues sector neutralization, does the decision depend on a particular factor? Or are the choices different for the long-only investor compared to the long-short investor? The research paper by Ehsani, Harvey, and Li (2021) answers these questions and provides investors with an interesting insight on this topic.