Summer Olympics are a major event that attracts attention from the moment the host country is announced. However, that’s not shocking. The Olympics require a lot of planning, infrastructure building and investments. Still, countries battle for the opportunity to host these events. Undoubtedly, hosting the Olympics is prestigious, helps tourism, and many even argue that it also helps the domestic economy despite the costs of hosting. Therefore, it is natural to expect that the Tokyo Olympics should impact the domestic stock market.

Various research papers show that market sentiment, also called investor sentiment, plays a role in market returns. Market sentiment refers to the general mood on the financial markets and investors’ overall tendency to trade. The mood on the market is divided into two main types, bullish and bearish. Naturally, rising prices indicate bullish sentiment. On the other hand, falling prices indicate bearish sentiment. This paper shows various ways to measure market sentiment and its influence on returns.

Additionally, we take a look at an overnight anomaly in combination with three market sentiment indicators. We analyse the Brain Market sentiment indicator in addition to VIX and the short-term trend in SPY ETF. Our aim is not to build a trading system. Instead, it is to analyze financial markets behaviour. Overall the transaction costs of this kind of strategy would be high. However, more appropriate than using this system on its own would be to use it as an overlay when deciding when to make trades.

This week’s blog is unique compared to our previous posts. We have identified two papers that are connected, each with interesting findings and implications. One of today’s leading topics is the Robinhood trading platform, but not from the point of view of recent short squeezes and speculations. The Robinhood can be an interesting insight into retail investing and implications for the market. Research suggests that despite the very low share of retail investors, their power is significantly high. This seems to be caused by the inelastic market, which passive investing contributes to. Therefore, inelasticity is another crucial point.

One of the most popular reports in the Portfolio Analysis section of our Quantpedia Pro tool is “Volatility Targeting”. In this article, we will explain some theory behind this portfolio management method. And then, we will go more in-depth, pick several examples and explain some common volatility targeting variants.

Fiscal stimulus measures have become a hot topic in the financial markets. However, that is not surprising, since fiscal stimulus is a crucial government method to ease the pandemic crisis’s impacts. Therefore, the investors and market are very sensitive to this topic, and they react to the fiscal stimulus and any related news very sharply. While it is intuitive that the withdraw of the stimulus measures will negatively affect the markets and markets will fall, the magnitude of these falls is unknown. Novel research by Chan-Lau and Zhao (2020), quantifies the impacts of withdrawals and it’s effects on the stock markets worldwide. The reactions are especially negative if the fiscal stimulus is withdrawn “too soon”. According to the authors, too soon is when the number of daily COVID cases is high compared to the recent past.

Short-term mean reversion trading on equity indexes is a popular trading style. Often, price-based technical indicators like RSI, CCI are used to assess if the stock market is in overbought or oversold conditions. A new research article written by Chainika Thakar and Rekhit Pachanekar explores a different indicator – TRIN, which compares the number of advancing and declining stocks to the advancing and declining volume. TRIN’s advantage is that it’s cross-sectionally based and its calculation uses not only price but also volume information. Thakar& Pachanekar’s research paper is useful for fans of indicator’s based trading strategies and offers a short introduction to TRIN’s calculation together with an example of mean-reversion market timing strategy written in a python code.

Authors: Chainika Thakar, Rekhit Pachanekar

Title: Trading Index (TRIN) – Formula, Calculation & Strategy in Python