Trend-Following Market Timing

Cut your losses short, and let your profits run. For centuries, that's probably the number one trader's adage. This is exactly what the trend following (TF) investment discipline does – using simple rules to be long markets in uptrends and short markets in downtrends. The mathematical rules used to identify uptrends and downtrends are predefined and mechanically implemented to eliminate human emotions in deciding when to be in or out of a market. The most common way trend following is implemented is with managed futures funds, which are typically placed in the “alternatives bucket” of an investment portfolio, perhaps making up 5% of the total. A good example of such a fund is the AQR Managed Futures Strategy Fund (Symbol: AQMIX). Managed futures funds apply the trend-following discipline to various equity and fixed income markets, along with currency pairs and commodity futures. In this blog, I'll examine the trend-following approach applied to asset classes that have a positive risk...

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Does Technical Analysis Work?

An essential component of successful trading is having a good sense of timing. The standard industry tool for getting the timing right is technical analysis, so we need to examine its effectiveness. I'll assume the reader is familiar with technical analysis, and as an asset class trader, I'll also assume we control a limited amount of assets such that positions can be bought and liquidated with minimal trading impact costs. For extremely large asset management firms and hedge funds, technical analysis is not an available tool because all-in trading costs are prohibitively expensive with this approach. These firms are forced to use other approaches such as value investing, which is, ironically, a horrible tool for timing price moves. Even large trend following CTAs are forced to use the most liquid futures contracts to minimize trading impact costs. So perhaps being small and using technical analysis is an advantage for us. In a nutshell, technical analysis is the analysis of price...

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Follow the Flows – The Last 20 Years

In the last blog, I discussed the trading edge associated with predicting investment flows. In this blog, I'll provide examples using this trading edge to pick outperforming asset classes. Of course, this is a hypothetical exercise with the full benefit of hindsight, and as is often the case, flows may not be the only cause of the observed performance. 1995 to 1999 This era is widely recognized as the culmination of the 1982 to 1999 secular bull market in U.S. equities. As shown in Figure 1, it was a time when retail investors were obsessed with stocks as illustrated by the meteoric rise in CNBC viewership.1 Index investing was also becoming very popular, but at that time indexing solely meant investing in the S&P 500. Mutual fund managers were the investment stars of the era. Figure 1. CNBC viewership history.1 Figure 2 from Ned Davis Research shows equity mutual fund net flows as a percentage of U.S. market capitalization from 1960 to present.2 These flows can be attributed...

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Follow the Flows

In a nutshell, I want to own securities held by asset classes receiving large inflows of cash over an intermediate 6 to 12 month time scale, and avoid asset classes facing large intermediate-to-long term outflows. Large intermediate-term inflows create essentially continuous daily net-demand that tends to bid up the price of the associated securities over time. Outflows do the opposite. We want to  jump ahead of the buying and selling as long as the flows are significant and expected to continue over time. Inflows leading to outperformance can also be self-reinforcing as many investors are susceptible to performance chasing (flows lead to more flows). Who’s on the other side of this trade? Long-term flows tend to be strategic allocation decisions made by large institutional investors, foreign investors, investment advisors/brokers and retail investors, in a manner that is typically price-insensitive. Nowadays the vast majority of investors spend their time deciding what investment...

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Motivated Buying and Selling

Providing liquidity to motivated buyers and sellers has worked throughout history. It's an enduring trading edge that I expect to work forever – both in and out of the trading arena. In life, a person highly motivated to purchase a specific house, a specific car or the latest consumer gadget pays a price that’s higher than a reasonable substitute. A person forced to sell a house will likely concede a not-so-small financial penalty because of the need to sell immediately. Consistently being a motivated buyer of things will act as a drag on the personal balance sheet. Taking advantage of sales or the occasional motivated seller provides a little alpha in the growth of personal wealth. Similar opportunities occur in the financial markets. With respect to the motivated buying/selling (MB/MS) edge, we’re searching for moments in time when the price action is affected by a large amount of buying/selling that is price-insensitive AND is occurring due to reasons unrelated to enhancing...

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Efficient Markets Hypothesis Foundations

In a previous blog I discussed the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), which can be summed up with the following statement by recent Nobel Prize winner Eugene Fama. An efficient capital market is one in which security prices fully reflect all available information.1 I presented the following three arguments in favor of pragmatically adopting an efficient markets view when investing. The logic of hyper-competition in a fair trading arena – any trading edge will quickly attract competition and be arbitraged away. The mathematical fact that investors as a whole cannot beat the market, and since professional investors manage the majority of assets, aggregate professional alpha must be close to zero before fees. While acknowledging that there can be long-term skilled winners, the empirical evidence suggests it's very difficult to distinguish luck and skill when evaluating past performance, even when judging your own trading ability. In this blog I'll go one level deeper to discuss the...

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Asset Class or Trading Strategy? 

Liquid alternative funds are the new hip product sold by investment management companies. Liquid alt funds offer strategies that have been used by hedge funds, managed futures funds and private partnerships for many years with the potential to earn a higher risk-adjusted return than stocks and bonds often combined with a low correlation. Previously this space was largely off limits to small investors due to institutional-sized minimums or the need to be an accredited investor. Now these strategies are accessible to all investors via ETF and open-ended fund structures, which offer daily liquidity. The trend towards liquid alt funds is motivated by the desire for enhanced portfolio diversification and the need to do something about low bond yields. These were the same motivations that led to the massive growth of hedge fund assets over the past 10 years as pension funds allocated to this space following the 2000 to 2002 bear market. Pension funds were basically emulating the Ivy League...

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Efficient Markets

The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) can be summed up with the following statement: An efficient capital market is one in which security prices fully reflect all available information.1 What does this statement mean? It implies that all information that is commonly used to make investment and trading decisions is already accounted for, without bias, in current prices. It implies that technical and fundamental analysis have no value in beating the market. It implies that luck is the primary factor in determining investment manager winners and losers. It implies that buying and holding the market over the long term is the most logical approach to participating in the markets. The EMH can never be proven either empirically or mathematically. However, this is one economic idealization that is actually pretty useful in practice. There is an enormous amount of academic evidence that is consistent with the EMH. The efficient markets logic is also very compelling. As a trader, we need to...

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Trading Asset Classes  

I gravitated to asset classes fairly quickly when I first started trading. I had a 60 hour/week engineering job, and didn't have the time to perform any kind of individual security analysis or sort through hundreds of individual stock charts each day. There were substantially fewer asset classes to keep track of, and that was manageable for me. This was in the early 1990s before ETFs were available, so I used individual mutual funds. Most practitioners in the field define asset classes very broadly, such as stocks, bonds and cash. From these broad asset classes, there are sub-asset categories among stocks and bonds. For instance, Ned Davis Research1 divides the U.S. stock market into nine stock sectors and about a 100 industry groups. Morningstar splits stocks into nine style boxes with growth versus value on one axis, and small versus large capitalization stocks on the other. Similarly, there are many bond sub-asset categories. Morningstar2 divides bonds along the dimensions of...

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Finding an Edge 

What is the goal of trading and active portfolio management? It's not just to make money or to get rich. The goal is to generate wealth for yourself and/or your clients at an above-average risk-adjusted return. With respect to trading and investing, there are two major markets used for wealth creation – the stock market and the bond market. Each market represents an arena where thousands, or even millions, of competitors battle to enhance returns. Figure 1 shows the annualized returns for U.S. stocks, bonds, T-bills (as a benchmark for cash) and inflation since 1926.1 The annualized standard deviation of returns is used as a measure of risk (there are many other risk measures to choose from). Figure 1. Historical returns of stocks, bonds, T-bills and inflation for the United States from 1926 - 2014.1 Considering all stock, bond and currency markets from countries around the world, along with commodities and derivatives markets, there are many financial arenas in which traders attempt...

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