Science has been in a “replication crisis” for more than a decade. But what does it mean to us, investors and traders? Is there any “edge” in purely academic-developed trading strategies and investment approaches after publishing, or will they perish shortly after becoming public? After some time, we will revisit our older blog on this theme and test the out-of-sample decay of trading strategies. But this time, we have hard data – our regularly updated database of replicated quant strategies.

Skewness is one of the less-known but practical measures from statistics that can be used in trading. It is defined as a measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a random variable around its mean. The goal of this analysis is to explore the commodity skewness trading strategy and perform the battery of robustness tests to see how sensitivity analysis changes overall results regarding performance, volatility, and Sharpe ratios.

At the end of 2018, researchers at Google AI Language made a significant breakthrough in the Deep Learning community. The new technique for Natural Language Processing (NLP) called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) was open-sourced. An incredible performance of the BERT algorithm is very impressive. BERT is probably going to be around for a long time. Therefore, it is useful to go through the basics of this remarkable part of the Deep Learning algorithm family.

It’s always fun to push the boundaries of technology and see what it can do. The AI chatbots are the hot topic of current discussion in the quant blogosphere. So we have decided to test OpenAI’s ChatGPT abilities. Will we persuade it to become a data analyst for us? While we may not be there yet, it’s clear that AI language models like ChatGPT can soon revolutionize how we approach to finance and data analysis.

In the last third installment, we will finish exploring the world of market timing strategies (see parts 1 & 2). We will focus on yield curve predictors and incorporate all three ideas (price-based, macro-economic, and yield curve predictors) into one final trading strategy that yields an annual return above that of the stock market while doubling its Sharpe ratio and reducing maximal drawdown by two thirds.

In this second installment in a series of three articles, we will continue with our goal to construct a market timing strategy that would sidestep the equity market during bear markets. A few days ago, we started with price-based market timing strategies. Today, we will focus on macroeconomic indicators and predictors derived from the movements in the commodity markets.