Trend Following Factors from Hsieh and Fung

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The beauty of R and academic replication is that on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend I can read an academic paper and do some analysis all before breakfast.  In this case, the paper is

Hsieh, David A. and Fung, William, The Risk in Hedge Fund Strategies: Theory and Evidence from Trend Followers. The Review of Financial Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, Summer 2001 .
Available at author’s site at Duke University: PDF file.

with data courtesy of the authors available at http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~dah7/DataLibrary/TF-Fac.xls

Let’s get the factors into R and run some very introductory analysis on the Edhec data from PerformanceAnalytics.  The factors as defined by the authors are:

Trend Following Risk Factors from Fung and Hsieh, RFS (2001)
PTFSBD: Return of PTFS Bond lookback straddle
PTFSFX: Return of PTFS Currency Lookback Straddle
PTFSCOM:Return of PTFS Commodity Lookback Straddle
PTFSIR: Return of PTFS Short Term Interest Rate Lookback Straddle
PTFSSTK:Return of PTFS Stock Index Lookback Straddle

From TimelyPortfolio
From TimelyPortfolio

What a nice way to ease into the weekend. Now for the hard part–thinking about how I might use this.

R code from GIST:

#Hsieh, David A. and Fung, William,
#The Risk in Hedge Fund Strategies: Theory and Evidence from Trend Followers.
#The Review of Financial Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, Summer 2001 .
#Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=250542
#http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~dah7/DataLibrary/TF-Fac.xls
require(gdata)
require(quantmod)
require(PerformanceAnalytics)
require(FactorAnalytics)
URL <- "http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~dah7/DataLibrary/TF-Fac.xls"
#get xls sheet TF-Fac starting at the row with yyyymm
hsieh_factor <- read.xls(URL,sheet="TF-Fac",pattern="yyyymm",stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
hsieh_factor.clean <- hsieh_factor
#clean up date to get to yyyy-mm-dd
hsieh_factor.clean[,1] <- as.Date(paste(substr(hsieh_factor[,1],1,4),
substr(hsieh_factor[,1],5,6),
"01",sep="-"))
#remove percent sign and make numeric
hsieh_factor.clean[,2:6] <- apply(
apply(hsieh_factor[,2:6],
MARGIN=2,
FUN=function(x) {gsub("%", "", x)}),
MARGIN=2,
as.numeric)/100
#get rid of NAs
hsieh_factor.clean <- hsieh_factor.clean[,1:6]
hsieh_factor.xts <- as.xts(hsieh_factor.clean[,2:6],order.by=hsieh_factor.clean[,1])
chart.CumReturns(hsieh_factor.xts,
main="Hsieh and Fung Trend Following Factors",
xlab=NA,
legend.loc="topleft")
mtext(text="Source: http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~dah7/DataLibrary/TF-Fac.xls",
side=3,adj=0.10,outer=TRUE, col="purple",cex=0.75,line=-4)
chart.Correlation(hsieh_factor.xts,main="Hsieh and Fung Trend Following Factors")
mtext(text="Source: http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~dah7/DataLibrary/TF-Fac.xls",
side=1,adj=0.10,outer=TRUE, col="purple",cex=0.75,line=-1.5)
#get edhec data for sample factor analysis
data(edhec)
cta <- edhec[,1]
index(cta)=as.Date(format(index(cta),"%Y-%m-01"))
cta.factors <- na.omit(merge(cta,hsieh_factor.xts))
chart.RollingStyle(cta.factors[,1],cta.factors[,2:NCOL(cta.factors)],
width=36,
colorset=c("darkseagreen1","darkseagreen3","darkseagreen4","slateblue1","slateblue3","slateblue4"),
main="Edhec CTA by Trend Following Factors Rolling 36 Months")
mtext(text="Source: http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~dah7/DataLibrary/TF-Fac.xls",
side=1,adj=0.10,outer=TRUE, col="purple",cex=0.75,line=-5)

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