Au.Tra.Sy blog – Automated Trading System

Systematic Trading research and development, with a flavour of Trend Following

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Entries Tagged as 'Futures'

VIX, Peso… Sometimes you just cannot trade it!

August 9th, 2010 · 5 Comments · Futures

Or a case for going short VIX despite high bullish consensus?
I have been going on about roll yield and term structure for a few posts, and through two very concrete examples we’ll see how it can affect your trading and system development
A reader recently mentioned a paper (pdf by Sloyer and Tolkin) presenting a theoretical [...]

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Better Trend Following via improved Roll Yield

July 26th, 2010 · 26 Comments · Futures, Strategies, Trend Following

To round off a series on backwardation, contango and roll yield (posts 1, 2 and 3), let’s put all this info together and use it in an innovative trading strategy to show how it can improve the performance of a Trend Following system by optimising its roll yield component (note: this could also be applied [...]

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Roll Yield and Commodity Yield Curve

July 19th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Data, Futures

We have seen previously that backwardation and/or contango can induce a fairly large drift between the performance of an instrument’s spot market and its corresponding futures market.
This phenomenon can be described as roll yield of futures trading and I suggested it was one of the four components in Trend Following returns. As per that last [...]

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Crude Oil, Contango and Roll Yield for Commodity Trading

June 8th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Futures

We have already discussed how roll yield can negatively affect the overall return of a commodity holding The impact of contango or backwardation can be relatively large compared to the overall return.
Petroleum has unfortunately been in the news lately. Nevertheless, Crude Oil performance last year gave us a good illustration of the impact that contango/backwardation [...]

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MMDI Portfolio Filter in Trading Blox

February 2nd, 2010 · 4 Comments · Backtest, Futures, Software, Strategies

David Varadi, from the very good CSS Analytics blog, pointed me to his interesting findings on a Mean Median Divergence Indicator (MMDI) he devised as a replacement to the standard MACD.
I wanted to test the MMDI as a follow-up to Moving Median: a better indicator than Moving Average?. This also provided a good opportunity to [...]

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Mammoth Hedge Fund moves into Trend Following

January 28th, 2010 · 5 Comments · Futures, Trend Following

AQR is a top hedge fund, managing around $24B in Assets. Lately, they have been making noise about their moving into the Managed Futures space (a.k.a. Trend Following). They seem to be working at institutional investor’s acceptance of trend following as an “investment” concept. They might just be trying to catch up with another mammoth [...]

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