Blog

Does Factor Rank Matter for the Implied Volatility Skew Strategy?

Post Outline * Strategy Summary * Results * Conclusions/Analysis Strategy Summary First, if you're unfamiliar with the Implied Volatility Skew Strategy you can find a recent deep dive into the strategy and its performance here. In this short post, I look at the effect of using only the top N ranked ETFs from each Long/Short portfolio. In this case, N is equal to 3. This is an arbitrary selection and this study could be done with the top 1, 2, 4, etc. This differs from the original strate

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Backtesting the Implied Volatility Long/Short Strategy (10/18/16)

Post Outline * Strategy Summary * References * 4-Week Holding Period Strategy Update * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Updated (Target Leverage=2) Strategy Summary This is a stylized implementation of the strategy described in the research paper titled "What Does Individual Option Volatility Smirk Tell Us About Future Equity Returns" by Yuhang Xing, Xiaoyan Zhang and Rui Zhao. The authors show that their SKEW factor predicts individual equity returns up to 6 months! ABSTRACT Stocks exhi

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Backtesting the Implied Volatility Strategy - A Deeper Dive (10/03/16)

Post Outline * Strategy Summary * References * 4-Week Holding Period Strategy Update * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Updated (Target Leverage=2) * Deep Dive into the Weekly Strategy using Quantopian's Pyfolio * Strategy Concerns Strategy Summary This is a stylized implementation of the strategy described in the research paper titled "What Does Individual Option Volatility Smirk Tell Us About Future Equity Returns" by Yuhang Xing, Xiaoyan Zhang and Rui Zhao. The authors show that their

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Backtesting the Implied Volatility Long/Short Strategy (9/27/16)

Post Outline * Strategy Summary * References * 4-Week Holding Period Strategy Update * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Updated (Target Leverage=2) Strategy Summary This is a stylized implementation of the strategy described in the research paper titled "What Does Individual Option Volatility Smirk Tell Us About Future Equity Returns" by Yuhang Xing, Xiaoyan Zhang and Rui Zhao. The authors show that their SKEW factor predicts individual equity returns up to 6 months! ABSTRACT Stocks exhi

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Backtesting the Implied Volatility Long/Short Strategy (9/20/16)

Post Outline * Strategy Summary * References * 4-Week Holding Period Strategy Update * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Updated (Target Leverage=2) Strategy Summary This is a stylized implementation of the strategy described in the research paper titled "What Does Individual Option Volatility Smirk Tell Us About Future Equity Returns" by Yuhang Xing, Xiaoyan Zhang and Rui Zhao. The authors show that their SKEW factor predicts individual equity returns up to 6 months! ABSTRACT Stocks exhi

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Backtesting the Implied Volatility Long/Short Strategy (9/14/16)

Post Outline * Strategy Restart * Strategy Summary * References * 4-Week Holding Period Strategy Update * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Updated (Target Leverage=2) Strategy Restart After a ~2 month pause, the implied volatility long/short strategy has returned! If you were previously unaware this strategy relied on aggregating free options data via the now defunct Yahoo Finance Options API. After some time I was able to track down another free, reliable, source for options data via Bar

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Aggregating Free Options Data with Python

Post Outline * Motivation * Code Requirements * Creating our Scraper Class * Aggregating the Data * Github Gist Code * Disclaimers Motivation This year I implemented a simulated trading strategy based on the research paper titled "What Does Individual Option Volatility Smirk Tell Us About Future Equity Returns" by Yuhang Xing, Xiaoyan Zhang and Rui Zhao. The authors show that their SKEW factor has predictive power for equity returns for up to 6 months. Because historical options data

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Institutional Level Long/Short Strategies in Quantopian (OCF/EV)

Post Outline * Background * Strategy Summary * Implementation Details * Strategy Results and Analysis * References (Notes) Background Recently I was blessed with an introduction to S&P Global-Market Intelligence's Director of Business Development, Matt Morrissy and gifted a trial membership to the S&P Capital IQ platform [1]. Specifically, I was given an opportunity to review and provide feedback for their "Alpha Factor Library." Their team, the Quantamental Group [2], has researched an

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Backtesting the Implied Volatility Long/Short Strategy (7/12/16)

Post Outline * Strategy Summary * References * 4-Week Holding Period Strategy Update * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Update (Target Leverage=1) * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Updated (Target Leverage=2) Strategy Summary This is a stylized implementation of the strategy described in the research paper titled "What Does Individual Option Volatility Smirk Tell Us About Future Equity Returns" by Yuhang Xing, Xiaoyan Zhang and Rui Zhao. The authors show that their SKEW factor predicts ind

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Backtesting the Implied Volatility Long/Short Strategy (7/6/16)

Post Outline * Strategy Summary * References * 4-Week Holding Period Strategy Update * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Update (Target Leverage=1) * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Updated (Target Leverage=2) Strategy Summary This is a stylized implementation of the strategy described in the research paper titled "What Does Individual Option Volatility Smirk Tell Us About Future Equity Returns" by Yuhang Xing, Xiaoyan Zhang and Rui Zhao. The authors show that their SKEW factor predicts ind

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Backtesting the Implied Volatility Long/Short Strategy (6/28/16)

Post Outline * 4-Week Holding Period Strategy Update * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Update (Target Leverage=1) * 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Updated (Target Leverage=2) 4-Week Holding Period Strategy Update Download the spreadsheet here. 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Update (Target Leverage=1) Results simulated using quantopian platform 1-Week Holding Period Strategy Update (Target Leverage=2) RESULTS SIMULATED USING QUANTOPIAN PLATFORM I'll post the components of each of the

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Estimated Longevity of a Retirement Portfolio in Years (Python)

Post Outline: * What is Shortfall Risk (Shortfall Probability, Ruin Risk, Risk of Ruin etc.)? * Issues with Traditional Shortfall Risk Estimates * Key Insights (Solutions) * Python Code (Implementation) What is Shortfall Risk (Shortfall Probability, Risk of Ruin, etc.)? portfolio value will fall below some minimum acceptable levelover some time horizonAnalystNotes.com Issues with Traditional Shortfall Risk Estimates In the article "It's Time to Retire Ruin (Probabilities)" the author,

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