Bearish trends or deep corrections in international equity markets starting in 2022 and rising interest rates worldwide brought investors’ attention back to not only once-proclaimed dead factor investing. From long-run and short run, during different market cycles, different factors behave differently. What’s fortunate is that it is pretty predictable to some extent. Andrew Ang, Head of Factor Investing Strategies at BlackRock, in his Trends and Cycles of Style Factors in the 20th and 21st Centuries (2022), used Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter and spectral analysis to investigate different models to draw some general conclusions on most-widely used factors. We will take a look at a few of quite the most interesting ones of them.

The expected return on the “variance factor” known as variance risk premium (VRP) is nothing new to options markets. For any investor interested in benefitting from this phenomenon, we present the study of Dörries et al. (2021), which provides a clear overview of different VRP-earning strategies.

Over the last few years, we may have noticed a significant growth in retail investing. No surprise, the COVID pandemic outbreak increased the numbers even more, and undoubtedly, options trading is no exception. According to the authors (de Silva, Smith, Co), retail traders seek options expecting spikes in volatility and, for that reason, incline toward firms with more media coverage. Furthermore, their trading increases around the time of firms’ earnings announcements. As a result, market makers benefit from the behavior mentioned above, which causes a large flow of money from retail to market makers.

Delta hedging is a trading strategy that aims to reduce the directional risk of short option strategy and reach a so-called delta-neutral position. It does so by buying or selling small increments of the underlying asset. Similarly, grid trading is a trading strategy that buys/sells an asset depending on its price moves. When the price falls, it buys and sells when the price rises a certain amount above the buying price. This article examines the similarities between delta hedging and grid trading. Additionally, it analyzes numerous versions of grid trading strategies and compares their advantages and disadvantages.