Which sectors are coherent, and which aren’t? Previously The post “S&P 500 correlations up to date” looked at rolling mean correlations among stocks.  In particular it looked at rolling mean correlations of stocks within sectors. Of importance to this post is that the sectors used are taken from Wikipedia. ... [Read more...]

I haven’t heard much about correlation lately.  I was curious about what it’s been doing. Data The dataset is daily log returns on 464 large cap US stocks from the start of 2006 to 2012 October 5. The sector data were taken from Wikipedia. The correlation calculated here is the mean correlation ... [Read more...]

Here are some additions to the previous post on S&P 500 correlation. Correlation distribution Before we only looked at mean correlations.  However, it is possible to see more of the distribution than just the mean.  Figures 1 and 2 show several quantiles: 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%. Figure 1: Quantiles of 50-day rolling correlation of … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Ticker Sense posted about the mean correlation of the S&P 500. The plot there — similar to Figure 1 — shows that correlation has been on the rise after a low in February. Figure 1: Mean 50-day rolling correlation of S&P 500 constituents to the index. For me, this post raised a whole lot ... [Read more...]

What can we learn about the difference in structure between a Ledoit-Wolf variance matrix and a corresponding factor model variance? Previously We’ve generated a set of random portfolios with constraints on the risk fractions of a Ledoit-Wolf variance matrix, and a corresponding set of random portfolios with risk fraction ... [Read more...]