I have no idea who originated the idea of using moving averages to determine entry and exit points in a trading system.  I do know that Mebane Faber (briefly discussed in Shorting Mebane Faber) has recently popularized the notion through his __7...

Drawdown is my favorite measure of risk.  It picks up extended autocorrelated pain often not seen in risk measures, and best illustrates frustration, panic, and loss of confidence (Drawdown Control Can Also Determine Ending Wealth).  I though...

Real yields even out to 10 years have now been competely squeezed. Either bond investors need to accept even worse negative real yields or deflation needs to get ugly for additional price returns from here. If deflation is the outcome, then shorts in s...

If we’re cooking up a bond return, we have access to 3 ingredients: inflation, credit, and real. Historically, the recipe looks like this (as described in Historical Sources of Bond Returns).0-5 parts inflation + 1-2 parts credit + 1-3 parts realand ...

I was intrigued by the CRAN update on a package ttrTests, especially since quantstrat is not built for backtesting system parameters and analyzing system performance as I mentioned in A Quantstrat to Build On Part 6.  ttrTests offers a nice start ...

I got a great idea from the zoo-overplot demo to make a very helpful visualization of system entry and exit.  Since the lm-based system presented in Unrequited lm Love is newest, I will use this system, but apply to the Nikkei 225 instead of the R...

In System Failure-Maybe it Will Help I presented the initial trials of a linear model system for stocks, and even though they were not a resounding success, I have been strangely determined to discover a working version of this framework.  Maybe t...

I hope everyone is enjoying the market.  After a crazy week personally and 6% intraday swings, I remember why I abandoned day trading. I often wonder if I should share ideas that do not work as well as I would like.  In this case, I know I ha...

Based on my perception of the last 3 years, I would have expected high dividend stocks to have substantially underperformed low and zero dividend stocks.  Fortunately, just like with size and momentum in Beating Kenneth French Small – High, we c...

Most forget that the tremendous macro imbalances caused by the 10 Trillion in foreign reserves are just 14 years old phenomenon but the results have been and will be profound.  The buying started after the Asia Pacific collapse of 1997, and the As...

I have noticed that the Russell 2000 (RUT) acts very differently from most of the other indexes that I have studied.  If we apply the system shown in Shorting Mebane Faber to RUT and then extend it with a simple slope, we notice something very dif...

Although I do not personally know Mebane Faber, I know enough that I do not want to short him. However, I thought it would be insightful to see how the short side of his “A Quantitative Approach To Tactical Asset Allocation” might look.  Once ...

What troubles me most about today’s environment is the persistent belief that crisis large or small results in a US dollar rally and lower Treasury rates. However, what happens if the US dollar and US Treasury rates are the source of the crisis? Then...

As an extension to yesterday’s post Just Arriving is Not Enough, I wanted to show how minimizing drawdown is a much better technique to help control comfort and potentially increase ending wealth.  CHTTX was one of the best performers of the fou...

I need some new R skills, and there is no better motivation to learn XML in R than one of the scariest financial datasets out there—the US Department of the Treasury Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) Quarterly Derivatives Report. I’ll...

THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE.  ACTING ON THIS MAY LOSE LOTS OF MONEY. In A Quantstrat to Build on Part 5, I promised some performance reporting on quantstrat portfolios, but then in REIT Momentum in Quantstrat, I discovered it is not nearly as ea...

With 148 pageviews over the last 24 hours, my post Kenneth French Gift to the Finance World has been popular relative to most of my other posts.  I think the popularity is due to Kenneth French’s notoriety and the amazing outperformance of Small...

Just like James Montier Ode to the Joy of Cash and David Merkel Got Cash?, I think cash is an extremely powerful tool.  Of the 3 ingredients (land, labor, and capital) of the economy, capital (cash) is most scarce at the end of a crisis or recessi...

Kenneth French gives one of the best gifts to the finance world at his website http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/ken.french/data_library.html.  I am surprised I have waited so long to write a post about this wonderful resource.  Aft...

I have had a lot of fun blogging at Timely Portfolio over the last 7 months.  Here are all the graphs that I have shown.  Thanks especially to R.