There are many ways one can lose money when investing, and exchange rates are one of the potential risk factors. Luckily, there are several ways to minimize this type of loss in your portfolio. Systematic FX hedging that uses currency factor strategies is a way of protecting an existing or anticipated position from an unwanted move in an exchange rate. It does not eliminate the risk of loss completely but helps to manage currency exposure better.

This is the third and final article from the clustering series. If you’ve missed the previous parts, here you can find the first and second parts of the series. This section examines trading strategies based on previously introduced clustering methods. The complete Portfolio Clustering report will be available for our Quantpedia Pro clients next week.

October’s is coming, and we continue our short series of introductory articles about portfolio clustering methods we will soon use in our new Quantpedia Pro report. In the previous blog, we introduced three clustering methods and discussed the pros and cons of each one. Additionally, we showed a few examples of clustering, and we presented various methods for picking an optimal number of clusters.

This section demonstrates the Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) – a centroid-based clustering method, Hierarchical Clustering, which uses machine learning and Gaussian Mixture Model based on probability distribution and applies all three methods to an investment portfolio that consists of eight liquid ETFs.

At the beginning of October, we plan to introduce for our Quantpedia Pro clients a new Quantpedia Pro report dedicated to clustering methods in portfolio management. The theory behind this report is more extensive; therefore, we have decided to split the introduction into our methodology into three parts. We will publish them in the next few weeks before we officially unveil our reporting tool. This first short blog post introduces three clustering methods as well as three methods that select the optimal number of clusters. The second blog will apply all three methods to model ETF portfolios, and the final blog will show how to use portfolio clustering to build multi-asset trading strategies.

As we have mentioned several times, the best course of action for a quant analyst who wants to develop a new trading strategy is to understand a well-known investment anomaly/factor fundamentally and then improve it. Quantpedia is a big fan of transferring ideas derived from academic research from one asset class to another. But that’s not the only possibility of improvement – we can try to embrace Roger Ibbotson’s theory of popularity, which states that popular assets/securities are usually overpriced compared to less-known (exotic) assets/securities. Additionally, more professional investors usually follow popular assets, and this market segment is probably significantly more efficient.

So, we went in this direction. We took a well-known commodity momentum factor strategy and investigated its performance among commodity futures that were part of the S&P GSCI respectively BCOM commodity indexes and then compared the strategy’s performance with a variant that traded only non-indexed commodity futures. As we had expected, the trading strategy using exotic assets performed significantly better.

As we have promised, we present a short article as an introduction into the methodology of the Quantpedia Pro CPPI reports. Quantpedia Pro clients can use the model portfolio built in the Portfolio Manager as a risky asset to test various variants – Basic CPPI, Drawdown Based CPPI and Dynamic Multiplier CPPI.