Finding a high-quality data source is crucial for quantitative trading strategies. Also, having a long history is beneficial. Fama & French, for example, offer free historical data for stocks and a variety of factors. However, it is very hard to get good-quality and free data for other asset classes. For this reason, we have already examined how to extend historical daily bond data to 100 years.

For any event-driven analysis or to perform stress tests of various historical situations, long-enough data can only help. Whether one wants to analyze past market patterns, or simply examine the risk of their portfolio under different historical scenarios, the use case for long data is pretty straightforward.

Following the theme of our previous article, we decided to extend historical data of another asset class, commodities. This article explains our commodity data methodology and introduces data sources, which helped us extend historical daily commodities data to 100 years.

Equity Value strategies have suffered hardly during years 2018, 2019 and also 2020. Due to the poor performance of Value during this period, many investors have abandoned the strategy, often expressing view that “Value strategy is not working anymore”. Nevertheless, equity Value strategies have managed a strong comeback recently, turning attention of investors and traders back to them. In our blog today, we will take a close look at many different equity Value strategies, their performance and how they behave. 

Finding a good data source with quality data and long history is one of the greatest challenges in quantitative trading. There definitely are some data sources with very long histories. However, they tend to be on the more expensive side. On the other hand, cheap or free data usually lacks quality and/or has shorter time frames.

This article explains how to combine multiple data sources to create a 100-year daily data history for US 10-year bonds. Having a 100-year history of daily data can be very beneficial to understanding the market patterns and analyzing history and extending backtests to arrive at a new source of out-of-sample data.

Furthermore, suppose you want to examine how your portfolio would have performed during various historical events or to backtest a strategy during multiple market phases. In that case, the long history provides more opportunities. Besides, investors are always on the run to better understand the market. So, having substantial knowledge of history is crucial.

This second article offers a different look at high inflation periods, which we already analyzed in What’s the Best Factor for High Inflation Periods? – Part I. The second part looks at factor performance during two 10-year periods of high inflation. What’s our main takeaway? The best hedge for a high inflation period is the value or momentum factor. Other promising factors (energy sector, small-cap stocks, or long-run reversal) don’t perform as consistently as value and momentum.

Another period of long sustained high inflation is probably right around the corner, as the Russia-Ukraine Conflict keeps evolving, and its end is nowhere to be seen. In this article, we analyzed the Consumer Price Index from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, which includes the rate of inflation in the USA since 1913. We found multiple years during which the inflation was abnormally high and analyzed the performance of the known equity long-short factors. The factors with the highest average performance are HML (value stocks), long-term reversal, momentum, and energy stocks. On the other hand, tech stocks, bond-like assets, and the SMB factor should be avoided during the high inflation periods.