Download PDF USA US main indexes ended another week in red territory, with the S&P 500 down 1.27% and the NASDAQ Composite losing more than double this figure. The worst performers mainly pertain to the financial, technology and communication services sectors. The energy industry shined instead, yielding huge gains thanks Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Relative Value strategies in equities are all those strategies that seek to minimize their systematic risk exposures while retaining exposure to certain idiosyncratic factors. We decided to analyze those strategies because their non-directional nature can be interesting in the current environment characterized by high geopolitical tensions and Read more…
Download PDF Introduction What happens in option markets strongly influences the behavior of the underlying asset. In this article, we review the evidence and academic research on the dynamic relation between market makers’ gamma exposure and the price process of the underlying assets, specifically in terms of intraday volatility and Read more…
Download PDF USA This Monday was Presidents day in the United States, therefore markets only opened on Tuesday for what would turn out to be an eventful week. In general all major US indices are up with health and communication services leading the pack and consumer discretionary underperforming. The S&P Read more…
Download PDF The risk-free rate is a very wide-spread concept and fundamental for various topics in finance, most notably corporate valuation and derivatives pricing. Often however, not much thought is given to what a risk-free asset is and what rate to use. This article will dive deeper into the theoretical Read more…
Download PDF Time of writing: Thursday 24, February 2022 Introduction On Thursday, Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine, spurring talks that an armed conflict might be about to start in eastern Europe. In this article, we pitch a directional global macro trade based on the currently unfolding scenarios, after Read more…
Download PDF Investors tend to overgeneralize about bear markets and speak of them as if they were a homogenous group in which experiences have been largely similar. The triggers, timing and profile of recovery vary significantly, and bear markets come in many shapes and sizes. That said, despite the differences Read more…
Download PDF Introduction One of the most basic tools used by traders to manage risk is a simple order given to a machine, the stop-loss order. Despite being accessible to all retail traders through their online brokers, it is often neglected or misused. In the first part of this article Read more…
Download PDF USA Equities markets dropped for a second consecutive week following continued angst of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Shelling in the border region prompted fears that Russia was fishing for a pretext for war and was exacerbated by U.S. President Joe Biden’s remarks that he is convinced that Read more…
Download PDF Over the last few decades, the overnight and intraday returns of the American market exhibit strange behavior, considering that the highest share of returns accrue in the after-hours trading and not during the day, as most would have expected. Indeed, a good visualization of the phenomenon is shown Read more…
Download PDF Introduction By now, everyone, even with only a slight interest in the financial world, has heard or read of the terms Quantitative Easing (QE) and Quantitative Tightening (QT). If on one side the first one, combined with fiscal stimulus, was more than necessary for the world economy to Read more…
Download PDF USA This week, the selloff in US equities, especially growth stocks continued. The most decisive event this week was the publication of inflation numbers this Thursday, which swung all indices but the S&P 500 Value Index into red territory after having started out the week with slight gains. Read more…
Download PDF You might have heard of Decentralized Finance, or DeFi for short, in the news lately. It is a part of the broad blockchain ecosystem that has taken the world by storm in the last couple of years. But what is DeFi, and what opportunities does it present? This Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Pairs Trading is a well known and one of the earliest statistical arbitrage trading methods. This article will present two rather simple pairs trading strategies, namely the Distance and Cointegration Method and discuss their levels of profitability over time and in the present day. Intuitively, pairs trading Read more…
Download PDF USA The US main index dropped sharply on Friday, after the Thanksgiving session, following a new Covid variant thread found in South Africa. “This variant has a large number of mutations, some of which are concerning,” the WHO said on Friday. The new variant is still under examination, Read more…