Trendfollowing

In this article, we explore the historical performance of sector momentum strategies and examine how their alpha has diminished over time. By analyzing the underlying causes behind this decline, we identify key factors contributing to the underperformance. Most importantly, we introduce an enhanced approach to sector momentum, demonstrating how this solution significantly improves the performance of an ETF sector momentum strategy, making it once again an effective tool for systematic investors.

Over the past few years, significant shifts in the financial landscape have reshaped the dynamics of global markets, including the cryptocurrency sector. Events such as the ongoing war in Ukraine, rising inflation rates, the soft landing scenario in the US economy, and the recent Bitcoin halving have all profoundly impacted market sentiment and price movements. Given these developments, we decided to revisit and reassess trading strategies, specifically Trend-following and Mean-reversion in Bitcoin published in 2022, which utilized data from November 2015 to February 2022. This new study explores how these strategies would have performed from November 2015 to August 2024, taking recent changes into account. The study also examines market changes between February 2022 and August 2024, highlighting developments since previous research. Additionally, it evaluates the influence of seasonality on Bitcoin’s price action, similar to our previous article – The Seasonality of Bitcoin. By analyzing these factors, we aim to provide deeper insights into the evolving behavior of the world’s leading cryptocurrency and guide investors through the complexities of today’s market environment.

It is not easy to build a robust trend-following strategy that will withstand different difficult market conditions and bring consistent results. The author of today’s work was not frightened by this task and delivered a full framework on how to design a robust trend-following strategy step by step.

In the fast-paced world of cryptocurrencies, understanding market sentiment can provide a crucial edge. As investors and traders seek to anticipate the volatile movements of Bitcoin, innovative approaches are continuously explored. One such method involves leveraging Google Trends data to gauge public interest and sentiment towards Bitcoin. This approach assumes that search volume on Google not only reflects current interest but can also serve as a predictive tool for future price movements. This blog post delves into the intricacies of using Google Trends as a sentiment predictor, exploring its potential to forecast Bitcoin prices and discussing the broader implications of sentiment analysis in the financial market.

Cryptocurrencies are already one of the major asset classes. They fill the top pages of magazines and are a topic of a day to day conversation. There are a lot of ways to buy them through a lot of different channels. But some of the hardcore HODLers like to keep their coin portfolio safe – they buy a portfolio of cryptocurrencies and hold them in cold storage. It has a lot of advantages (you will probably not become a victim of hacking if your crypto coins are in cold storage in your wall safe) but also some disadvantages (your cold storage device can become unreadable or destroyed). One of the disadvantages of cold storage is that while you hold the cryptocurrencies in your cold storage, you are exposed to the price swings of the cryptocurrency market (which can be tremendous). But do you need to have this risk, especially when the market is at an all-time high? What if you smartly hedged a portion of your portfolio? The goal of this article is to serve as an inspiration for a hedging strategy for your cold storage cryptocurrency portfolio. We do not say this is the only way to run a hedging strategy, but we would like to inspire you to start thinking about this possibility even when you have not considered it yet. Are you ready? Then let’s go 🙂

Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) funds are commonly associated with managed futures investing; however, beyond commodities, they have the flexibility to venture into other assets, including interest rates, currencies, fixed income, and equity indices. Most of the CTA strategies are trend-following, taking long positions in markets experiencing upward trends and short positions in markets undergoing downward trends, with the expectation that these trends will persist. CTA funds demonstrate a negative correlation with traditional assets, especially evident during periods of pronounced downturns in equity markets, and this characteristic positions them as an appealing alternative investment option, serving as a protective measure against extreme events in financial markets. We aim to explore these trend-following strategies by creating a “CTA proxy” using ETFs across all asset classes. Using ETFs allows for maintaining the diversification of CTA funds and represents an alternative with easier data availability compared to futures contracts. Additionally, we are very interested in seeing the contribution of the short leg of CTA sub-strategies to performance, as we have a hypothesis that we can significantly improve the risk-return profile of the CTA strategies by removing a short leg portion of the strategy from some assets.