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 The reactions are especially negative if the fiscal stimulus is withdrawn “too soon”.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

While there may be debates about passive and active investing, and even blogs about the numbers of active funds that were outperformed by the market, the history taught us that the outperformance of active or passive investing is cyclical. As a proxy for the active investing, the new Quantpedia’s research paper examines factor strategies and their smart allocation using fast or slow time-series momentum signals, the relative weights based on the strength of the signals and even blending the signals. While the performance can be significantly improved, using those smart approaches, the factors still got beaten by the market in both US and EAFE sample. However, the passive approach did not show to be superior. The factor strategies and market are significantly negatively correlated and impressively complement each other. The combined Smart Factors and market portfolio vastly outperforms both factors and market throughout the sample in both markets. With the combined approach, the ever-present market falls can be at least mitigated or profitable thanks to the factors.

Gold is a hot topic nowadays, but that is not a surprise given the worldwide situation. Gold is by the majority considered as a hedge, safe haven and often recognized for its ability to preserve the value in the long term. However, gold itself is not the only gold-related investable asset. There are numerous gold-related stocks – producers, explorers and developers. Common sense might suggest that the price of such stocks should reflect the gold prices, but the novel research by Baur and Trench (2020) shows that this logic is not always correct. Results suggest that gold equities cannot be considered as safe havens and investors differentiate between producers, explorers and developers during regular times. On the other hand, during the recent (and lasting) stressful COVID period, all types of gold stocks moved similarly to gold.

Authors: Dirk G. Baur and Allan Trench

Title: Not all Gold Shines in Crisis Times – COVID-19 Evidence