The US Electoral System In the US, the race for presidency is a long process that includes primaries, caucuses and national conventions, in which the parties’ candidates are determined. The main popular vote on who is going to be president of the US is called general election and will take Read more…
The famous Black-Scholes model is a mathematical model used for pricing financial derivatives. It is particularly useful because it offers an explicit formula for the value of a European option in terms of time to expiry of the contract T, risk-free interest rate r, strike price of the option K, Read more…
United States On the week ended November 4th, election uncertainty overshadowed improving fundamentals and sent US stocks to their ninth consecutive decline. Over the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined -1.0% to 17978, the S&P500 Index declined -1.4% to 2097.40, and NASDAQ declined -2.1% to 5080. The last heavy Read more…
There’s Nothing Smart about Smart Beta Smart Beta is anything but new: strategies developed in the 70s with the aim of outperforming the market through relatively simple quantitative analysis. It is the middle ground between passive and active investment. Due to the fact that when it comes to stock picking Read more…
United States Disappointing earnings from Apple and Amazon heavily weighed on the Nasdaq, falling 1.3%. Positive surprises from large companies, such as Procter & Gamble, helped to offset some disappointments in the tech sector, resulting in the S&P 500 falling 0.7%. So far, the earnings seemed solid, as this is Read more…
In the second part of the article, we saw how to spot anomalous price movements and how to profit from the divergence between futures and spot prices in the crypto market. Moreover, we showed the key indicator on which we should always be focused on. In this third part, which Read more…
Lately, prices of Copper have fallen below 50% of their peak price of 2011. Reasons are different, we will try to analyze the price-equilibrium motivations and then, look into some correlations of the red metal. As always, the variation in price is primarily driven by the relationship between supply and Read more…
United States The main news in the United States this week was the job report published on Friday which revealed that job gains of 156,000 jobs were slightly below consensus estimates of 175,000 in September. The key takeaways of the report are that the job growth is healthy even though Read more…
This article is the follow up to “How to Manipulate the Bitcoin Market (1/3)”. In the second part, we want to show how the spikes in price between the end of May and the first half of June 2016 were the result of just a few investors who used huge Read more…
The past summer has been quite hot: we saw unexpected Brexit, Turkish failed coup, the presidential campaign in the US is on the peak, and EMs are bursting out of inflows. On the backdrop of all these events, one very interesting trend may have left out of the scope of Read more…
As of today (02-10-2016) there are 16,051,950 bitcoins out of 21 million that will ever be in circulation, priced at $604.05 each (that makes a total market capitalization around $9.7 billion). As a comparison, $9.7 billion is approximately equal to only 1.5% of Apple’s total market capitalization. During next weeks, Read more…
United States The S&P 500 rose 17.14 points, or 0.8%, to close at 2,168.27 on Friday although the index was down 0.1% in September, the Nasdaq Composite closed at 5,312.00, adding 1.7% in September. Moreover, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.9% but fell 0.8% for the month. Analysts have Read more…
United States This week the S&P500 gained 1%, DJIA is up 0.60% and NASDAQ100 remained somewhat unchanged. The VIX volatility index registered a sharp decrease of more than 20%, signaling that market participants expect a brief calm period following the Brexit turmoil. In addition, VIX ETFs were the most shorted Read more…
Today we are living in a period of ultra-low and in many cases negative interest rates. This has been caused by strong expansionary policies by most central banks, especially in developed countries. In fact, in Japan and Eurozone central bank deposit rates are negative, in the UK and other European Read more…
This year has been particularly good for emerging markets and there are several reasons underlying the so-called EM rally. The main one is probably the yield hunt, in which yield-hungry investors move to riskier assets in order to have some decent return in the low interest rates environment, thus boosting Read more…