Mean Reversion vs Trend Following Through the Years

Something I am always thinking about is how the markets are behaving now vs the past few years vs several years ago. My edge on the strategies I trade depends on two main ideas. One, current market behavior is similar to what I tested on which is normally the last 5-10 years. Two, not too many others have found the same edge. Unfortunately for (2), more and more people are trading quant style and edges are harder to find and smaller when I do find them. The only thing I can control is continuing to research for new strategies.

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Efficiency Ratio and Mean Reversion

While reading the January 2023 issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities, I came across an article about Efficiency Ratio (ER) by Perry Kaufman. In the article, he discusses using ER to decide when to trade mean reversion strategy vs a trend following one.

My curiosity on this was could I use the ER to filter trades in my mean reversion strategies.

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Volume and Mean Reversion Part 2

From the Volume and Mean Reversion post, a reader sent a suggestion to instead use the ratio of 10 day moving average of the Close times Volume divided by the 63-day moving average of the Close times Volume (CV10/63). I had not tried this before and wanted to see how well it would work.

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Volume and Mean Reversion

Overall, I have had very little success integrating volume into any of my strategies. Either volume would have no predictive value or if it did, using it reduced the number of trades too much to be worthwhile. It has been a long while since I have looked into this and I had some new ideas.

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Mean Reversion Check Up 2022

A common question I get is whether mean reversion is still working. My response is I am still trading a mean reversion strategy but the edges seem to get smaller. Over the year I have investigated this. I was asked again recently and wanted to investigate again. Here are the results of my 2022 investigation.

The Rules

Test date range 1/1/2000 to 9/30/2022. I wanted to keep the rules simple. I tested various ways with the 200-day moving average. The reason for this is that some people only trade stocks above the 200, while I like to trade without. In general, this will have more volatility but better returns.

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Internal Bar Strength for Mean Reversion

I’ve been writing this blog for nine years now. Sometimes I am amazed about topics I have not covered and this is one of them. When developing a new strategy, these are the indicators I likely test: RSI, Historical Volatility and Internal Bar Strength (IBS). I had a reader send me an email pointing me to research done on IBS. I thought let me send him my blog post on this. After searching my records and site, I could not find one. That made it easy to decide what my next post would be about.

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January Effect on Stocks

A member of The Crew recently asked me about the January Effect and if had I done any research on it. I had not. I have tested the December effect, which is buying the worst stocks of the year on December 1^st, Should You Buy the Best or Worst YTD Stocks.

From Investopedia, ‘The January Effect is a perceived seasonal increase in stock prices during the month of January. Analysts generally attribute this rally to an increase in buying, which follows the drop in price that typically happens in December when investors, engaging in tax-loss harvesting to offset realized capital gains, prompt a sell-off.” And then they state that the effect has largely disappeared. Time to find out.

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Multi-day Limits for Mean Reversion

A reader recently suggested leaving the limit orders for a mean reversion trade on for a couple of days. Typically, these orders are good only for one day unless the stock sets up again. I did not think that this would help but as I always tell my consulting clients when they ask me if an idea will work or not, “I am always surprised but what works and what doesn’t, so I test everything and let the numbers decide.” My expectation would be higher exposure but will this lead to higher returns?

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Mean Reversion Entry: At Open vs. Intraday Pullback vs Confirmation

For the mean reversion strategies that I have created in the past and are trading now, they typically enter at the next day’s open or wait for a further pullback intraday before entering. My current mean reversion strategy, which enters on a limit down, was doing great until a few months ago when the performance started to slip. Looking at the missed trades and the trades taken, it seemed like the best trades would have been entering at open or waiting for some intraday confirmation.

Waiting for a pullback to take out the previous day’s high was very popular when I started trading. But my testing then showed that it was better to wait for a further intraday pullback to enter. Have the markets changed such that waiting for confirmation is better?

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Adding candlesticks to mean reversion setup in a portfolio

In my previous post, Adding candlesticks to mean reversion setup, we looked at how various candle patterns could help individual trades. Now we will see how those results translate to a portfolio. And why I usually only do portfolio level testing.

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