People are saying I am not posting enough finance content. FINE. Once you have decent alphas a lot of the skill in running a systematic strategy is reducing turnover. Alpha is unknown but trading costs are certain. Keep trading to the minimum needed to monetise your alpha.
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How to pick b? A few ideas 1. Optimise it in a backtest (eg to maximise net Sharpe ratio) 2. Pick it to target a particular turnover, eg if your forecast horizon is ten days you hope to turn over ~20% of your book per day, so pick b to achieve this
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3. Pick a sensible value based on your max position size, eg 5-25% of max position size.
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I’m normally against optimising parameters based on a backtest but this is quite a benign optimisation. The main danger is that if your edge is overestimated, your optimisation will pick a value of b that is too low, so you should be conservative (eg double the “best” value of b)
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In practise I normally do either 1 or 2, but 3 is a good check that you have selected a sensible value.
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There is a mathematical model that produces this trading rule btw! If you have linear alpha, quadratic risk and trading costs proportional to trade size (eg a fixed bid offer spread) this is the trading rule that results. Can run through the math if there’s demand. Fin.
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This is a sort of “folk knowledge” in quant finance. It’s rarely discussed in books/papers because it’s so basic that it’s assumed everyone knows it, so I couldn’t find a good reference for it. Derivation is below.pic.twitter.com/rEcPF114VZ
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Nice thing about knowing the derivation is that it’s straightforward to extend it eg other t-cost forms (3/2 or quadratic), multiple assets (sigma becomes a covariance matrix) or introduce constraints on position size or turnover. Most extensions need to be solved numerically.
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