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.

Continue reading

Avoiding Volatile Trades

In my last blog post, Using Historical Volatility for Parameter Adjustment, I tested using historical volatility to determine trade rules. While reading the July 2022 Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities, I came across an article, “Is It Too Volatile To Trade?” by Perry Kaufman. I always like his work so I was interested to see what he had to say. He uses standard deviation from the median historical volatility to decide if a stock is too volatile. He points out that even though returns may be positive during volatile times, it comes with higher risk.

From my own research, I frequently use historical volatility (HV) in my strategies. Most of the time focusing on high HV because these are the stocks that are moving. But when I am trying to tame down drawdowns, I change the focus to low HV stocks. Kaufman’s concept is similar but not something I had tried.

Continue reading

S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats

Back in 2018, I wrote a post, Backtesting a Dividend Strategy, which was conceptually based on the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats. Just recently, Norgate Data started offering historical constituent data for the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats index. This would be a much ‘cleaner’ version compared to what I was trying to do in my original post. Would using this index produces better results?

Continue reading

Trend-Following Plus Momentum in ETFs

In a previous post, Trend-following vs. Momentum in ETFs, I compared trend-following and momentum to see which produced better results on a basket of ETFs. In the post, I mentioned combining trend-following and momentum into one strategy to see if combined they can beat buy and hold more often.

Continue reading

Trend-following vs. Momentum in ETFs

In Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) or Dual Momentum (DM) strategies, they often will use trend-following or momentum to decide whether to invest in asset or not. I have two questions. One, how often does either trend-following or momentum out-perform buy and hold? Two, of the two which one out-performs the other more often?

Continue reading

The 50/50 SPY Strategy

I was talking to my trading buddy about the annoying part of trend following strategies. They may get you out of the major sell off but then you miss part of the run up. Using a 200-day moving average on the SPY would have got you out in late 2018. This would have been within 10% from the top and you would not had the pain of the additional 10% drop in December. But one would not have gotten back in until late February, missing a good part of the run up.

There is a dual nature of trend following strategies. They generally reduce your drawdowns during the bad years at the expense of underperforming during the good years. This underperformance can be big and difficult to deal with. Now if one is in the conserve wealth (vs grow wealth) part of their life, then this may be okay, but still difficult to deal with.

What follows is a possible way to balance these issues.

Continue reading

SPY TLT Rotation

For my retirement accounts, I like to trade ETF strategies that require little work. One strategy we have all seen is the SPY/TLT strategy. There are many flavors of this concept. Some pick the best one over the last N months. Then there are different ways of allocating a portion of the portfolio to each. I currently don’t trade any SPY/TLT strategy and wanted to see if there was something interesting here.

Continue reading

Stiffness Indicator Analysis

A reader pointed me the November 2018 issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities to an article about a trend following indicator on S&P500 stocks. I liked the concept of the indicator and the article had backteted results and AmiBroker code. How could I resist not looking into this?

Little did I realize this would lead to Backtesting is Hard and How much does not having survivorship free data change test results?.

Continue reading

StockCharts Technical Rank (SCTR) Indicator Analysis

Overall the last few months, I’ve had several consulting client’s strategy use SCTR for either a ranking or a filter. I finally got curious about the predictive ability of SCTR. How good is? I could find no information on how each of the ranking buckets did X days later on StockCharts.com. Maybe these results are hidden behind the paywall which I do not have access to.

I developed PowerRatings for TradingMarkets.com and understand how hard it is to make a ranking indicator that works. Is SCTR an indicator I should be using for medium to longer term strategies? What will the numbers to us?

9/19/2018: Make sure and read my follow up post, StockCharts Technical Rank (SCTR) Rotation Strategy, where the results are very different.

Continue reading

External Strategy Rule Evaluation. Too many rules?

A common question I get is where do I find all my research ideas. My main source is Quantocracy. He does a great job of curating posts because the work is manually done. Then there the Better System Trader and Trend Following Radio podcasts. Usually from these sources I get a nugget of an idea to research or a simple strategy. Sometimes the post/podcast will recommend a book.

From one of these sources came the recommendation of the book “Trade Like A Stock Market Wizard” by Mark Minervini. Fortunately for me, my local library carried it. The strategy he covers in the book is a mixed of fundamentals, chart reading and technical analysis. Not something I would normally care about. I really enjoyed the chapters on risk management. In one chapter, he has very specific technical rules that all stocks must follow. On seeing this, I wondered could these rules be a basis for a trend following stock strategy? My second thought was, there are lots of rules there. Are all the rules necessary? The latter question is what I will focus on this post.

Continue reading