R Language

A variance campaign that failed

April 23, 2012 | Pat

they ought at least be allowed to state why they didn’t do anything and also to explain the process by which they didn’t do anything. First blush One of the nice things about R is that new statistical techniques fall into it.  One such is the glasso (related ...
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Information flows like water

April 16, 2012 | Pat

Guiding a ship, it takes more than your skill Spark David Rowe’s Risk column this month is about data leverage. The idea is that you are leveraging your data if you are using it to answer questions that are too demanding of information. The piece reminded me of a ... [Read more...]

R Statistics Mobile Console (iPhone)

April 13, 2012 | CloudStat

I’m trying to make a mobile version of R-GUI, here is one (trying with iPhone emulator), not so beautiful, but still work. Try at CloudStat Mobile. Below are the screenshots: Homepage Web-based R Console Statistical Apps Directory ( R Apps ) ... [Read more...]

Betas of the low vol cohorts

April 4, 2012 | Pat

How did the constraints affect portfolio betas, and how did the betas change over time? Previously “Low (and high) volatility strategy effects” created 6 sets of random portfolios — the so-called low vol cohorts — as of 2007 and showed their performance up to about a month ago. “Rebalancing the low vol cohorts” looked ... [Read more...]

Replacing market indices

April 2, 2012 | Pat

If equity markets suddenly sprang into existence now, would we create market indices? I’m doubtful. Why an index? The Dow Jones Industrial Average was born in 1896.  This was when computers were humans with adding machines (but they did do parallel processing).  At that point boiling “the market” down to ... [Read more...]

Beta is not volatility

March 26, 2012 | Pat

The missing link between beta and volatility is correlation. Previously “4 and a half myths about beta in finance” attempted to dislodge several myths about beta, including that beta is about volatility. “Low (and high) volatility strategy effects” showed a plot of beta versus volatility for stocks in the S&P 500 ... [Read more...]

Levenshtein distance in C++ and code profiling in R

March 25, 2012 | Dzidorius Martinaitis

At work, the client requested, if existing search engine could accept singular and plural forms equally, e. g. “partner” and “partners” would lead to the same result. The first option – stemming. In that case, search engine would use root of a word, e. g. “partn”. However, stemming has many weaknesses: ... [Read more...]

Low (and high) volatility strategy effects

March 23, 2012 | Pat

Does minimum variance act differently from low volatility?  Do either of them act like low beta?  What about high volatility versus high beta? Inspiration Falkenblog had a post investigating differences in results when using different strategies for low volatility investing.  Here we look not at a single portfolio of a ... [Read more...]

Review of “The Origin of Financial Crises” by George Cooper

March 19, 2012 | Pat

The subtitle is “Central banks, credit bubbles and the efficient market fallacy”. Executive summary This is much too important of a book to remain as obscure as it is.  Besides, it is quite a fun read. It talks about two subjects: Why markets for goods and services tend toward equilibrium ... [Read more...]

The quality of variance matrix estimation

March 12, 2012 | Pat

A bit of testing of the estimation of the variance matrix for S&P 500 stocks in 2011. Previously There was a plot in “Realized efficient frontiers” showing the realized volatility in 2011 versus a prediction of volatility at the beginning of the year for a set of random portfolios.  A reader commented ... [Read more...]

The shadows and light of models

March 5, 2012 | Pat

How wide is the darkness? Uses of models The main way models are used is to: shine light on the “truth” We create and use a model to learn how some part of the world works. But there is a another use of models that is unfortunately rare — a use ... [Read more...]

I see high frequency data

March 1, 2012 | Dzidorius Martinaitis

In the previous post I shared an example how to get high frequency data from IB broker (well, it is retail version of HFD – it has only best bid/ask and the trades). Now, once you saved some data – what should you do next? Next logical step would be data ... [Read more...]

A minimum variance portfolio in 2011

February 29, 2012 | Pat

2011 was a good vintage for minimum variance, at least among stocks in the S&P 500. Previously The post “Realized efficient frontiers” included, of course, a minimum variance portfolio.  That portfolio seemed interesting enough to explore some more. “What does ‘passive investing’ really mean” suggests that minimum variance should be considered ... [Read more...]

Realized efficient frontiers

February 27, 2012 | Pat

A look at the distortion from predicted to realized. The idea The efficient frontier is a mainstay of academic quant.  I’ve made fun of it before.  This post explores the efficient frontier in a slightly less snarky fashion. Data The universe is 474 stocks in the S&P 500.  The predictions ... [Read more...]

What does ‘passive investing’ really mean?

February 20, 2012 | Pat

We know the words but what do they mean? Some definitions Here are some definitions of “passive investment management”. Investopedia says: A style of management associated with mutual and exchange-traded funds (ETF) where a fund’s portfolio mirrors a market index. Wikipedia says: Passive management (also called passive investing) is ... [Read more...]

The BurStFin R package

February 16, 2012 | Pat

Version 1.01 of BurStFin is now on CRAN. It is written entirely in R, and meant to be compatible with S+. Functionality The package is aimed at quantitative finance, but the variance estimation functions could be of use in other applications as well. Also of general interest is threeDarr which creates ...
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