In the last post, Examples of Current Major Market Clusters, we looked at clustering Major Markets into 4 groups based on their correlations in 2012. Today, I want to continue with clustering theme and discuss methods of selecting number of clusters. I will look at the following methods of selecting optimal number ... [Read more...]

I want to follow up and provide a bit more details to the excellent “A Visual of Current Major Market Clusters” post by David Varadi. Let’s first load historical for the 10 major asset classes: Gold ( GLD ) US Dollar ( UUP ) S&P500 ( SPY ) Nasdaq100 ( QQQ ) Small Cap ( [...] [Read more...]

Today, I want to continue with the Principal Components theme and show how the Principal Component Analysis can be used to build portfolios that are not correlated to the market. Most of the content for this post is based on the excellent article, “Using PCA for spread trading” by Jev ... [Read more...]

In the Visualizing Principal Components post, I looked at the Principal Components of the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average index over 2012. Today, I want to show how we can use Principal Components to create Clusters (i.e. form groups of similar companies based on their distance from each ... [Read more...]

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a procedure that converts observations into linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components (Wikipedia). The PCA is a useful descriptive tool to examine your data. Today I will show how to find and visualize Principal Components. Let’s look at the components of the Dow Jones ... [Read more...]

Today I want to follow up with the XLLoop framework post. Please read the XLLoop framework post first to setup the XLLoop before trying the examples below. My first example is based on the TFX Package – to retrieve real-time FX quotes. To try this example, please first install the TFX ... [Read more...]

Today I want to highlight the XLLoop framework : Excel User-Define Functions in in any language. The XLLoop consists of two main components: An Excel addin implementation (XLL written in c++). A server and framework written in R (or/and in many other languages). The XLLoop allows you to connect Excel ... [Read more...]

Today I want to highlight the TFX Package created by Garrett See. TFX is an R Interface to the TrueFX(tm) Web API for free streaming real-time and historical tick-by-tick market data for dealable interbank foreign exchange rates with millisecond detail. Garrett provided a great tutorial, examples, and shiny application ... [Read more...]

Today, I want to highlight the Financial Turbulence Index idea introduced by Mark Kritzman and Yuanzhen Li in the Skulls, Financial Turbulence, and Risk Management paper. Timely Portfolio did a great series of posts about Financial Turbulence: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. As example, I will compute Financial Turbulence for the equal ... [Read more...]

I want to follow up with Extending Gold time series post by showing how we can extend Commodity time series. Most Commodity ETFs began trading in 2006, please see the List of Commodity ETFs page. I will use DBC – PowerShares DB Commodity Fund, one on the most liquid Commodity ETFs as ... [Read more...]

Today, I want to address some questions that I was getting regarding the Regime Detection post. In the Regime Detection post I showed an example based on the simulated data, and some of you tried to apply this example to actual stocks. There is one big problem that you have ... [Read more...]

I recently came across the Optimal Rebalancing Strategy Using Dynamic Programming for Institutional Portfolios by W. Sun, A. Fan, L. Chen, T. Schouwenaars, M. Albota paper that examines the cost of different rebablancing methods. For example, one might use calendar rebalancing: i.e. rebalance every month / quarter / year. Or one ... [Read more...]

Regime Detection comes handy when you are trying to decide which strategy to deploy. For example there are periods (regimes) when Trend Following strategies work better and there are periods when Mean Reversion strategies work better. Today I want to show you one way to detect market Regimes. To detect ... [Read more...]

I first read about the Couch Potato strategy in the MoneySense magazine. I liked this simple strategy because it was easy to understand and easy to manage. The Couch Potato strategy is similar to the Permanent Portfolio strategy that I have analyzed previously. The Couch Potato strategy invests money in ... [Read more...]

Today I want to show a simple example of how we can value a company using Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis. The idea is to compute the company’s Intrinsic Value based on the discounted future cash-flows. To compute future cash-flows I will use the historical Free Cash Flow growth ... [Read more...]

I want to address comments that were asked in my last post, Permanent Portfolio – Simple Tools, about Permanent Portfolio strategy. Specifically: The impact of transaction costs on the perfromance and Create a modified version of risk allocation portfolio that distributes weights across 3 asset classes: stocks(SPY), gold(GLD), and treasuries(... [Read more...]

The Barron’s article Still Too Pricey by Andrew Bary looks at the share price of the Facebook and based on the P/E ration valuation metrics concludes that even at the current prices, stock is overvalued. I want to show how to do this type of fundamental analysis using ... [Read more...]

I have previously described and back-tested the Permanent Portfolio strategy based on the series of posts at the GestaltU blog. Today I want to show how we can improve the Permanent Portfolio strategy perfromance using following simple tools: Volatility targeting Risk allocation Tactical market filter First, let’s load the ... [Read more...]

I recently came across the “An early Halloween for gold traders” article by Mark Hulbert. I have discussed this type of seasonality analysis in my presentation at R/Finance this year. It is very easy to run the seasonality analysis using the Systematic Investor Toolbox. This confirms that October have ... [Read more...]

I want to show the example of calling the Minimum Correlation Algorithm from Excel. I will use RExcel to connect R and Excel and will create a small VBA cell array function to communicate between Excel and R. I have previously discussed the concept of connecting R and Excel in ... [Read more...]