The rate of failure in quantitative finance is high, and particularly so in financial machine learning. The few managers who succeed amass a large amount of assets, and deliver consistently exceptional performance to their investors. However, that is a rare outcome, for reasons that will become...

Because the Sharpe ratio only takes into account the first two moments, it wrongly “translates” skewness and excess kurtosis into standard deviation.As a result: It deflates the skill measured on “well-behaved” investments (positive skewness, negative excess kurtosis). It inflates the...

Multiple empirical studies have shown that Order Flow Imbalance has predictive power over the trading range.The PIN Theory (Easley et al. [1996]) reveals the Microstructure mechanism by which: Market Makers adjust their trading range to avoid being adversely selected by Informed Traders;...

We introduce two online backtest overfitting tools: BODT simulates the overfitting of seasonal strategies (typical of technical analysis), and TMST simulates the overfitting of econometric strategies (typical of academic journals). We show that econometric methods lend themselves to extreme...

Mean-Variance portfolios are optimal in-sample, however they tend to perform poorly out-of-sample (even worse than the 1/N naïve portfolio!) We introduce a new portfolio construction method that substantially improves the Out-Of-Sample performance of diversified portfolios.The full paper is...

For large portfolio managers, a sequence of single-period optimal positions is rarely multi-period optimal. In particular, transaction costs can prevent large portfolio managers from monetizing most of their forecasting power. The solution is to compute the trading trajectory that comes...

High Frequency Trading is pervasive across all electronic financial markets. As algorithms replace an increasing number of tasks previously performed by humans, cascading effects similar to the Flash Crash of May 6th 2010 become more likely. In this study, we bring together a number of different...

We solve a multi-period portfolio optimization problem using D-Wave Systems' quantum annealer. We derive a formulation of the problem, discuss several possible integer encoding schemes, and present numerical examples that show high success rates. The formulation incorporates transaction costs...

Empirical Finance is in crisis: Our most important "discovery" tool is historical simulation, and yet, most backtests published in leading Financial journals are flawed.The problem is well-known to professional organizations of Statisticians and Mathematicians, who have publicly criticized the...