Basic forex strategies - page 9

 
How stocks are traded in the United States has been totally transformed. Gone are the dealers on NASDAQ and the specialists at the NYSE. Instead, a company’s stock can now be traded on up to sixty competing venues where a computer matches incoming orders. A majority of quotes are now posted by high-frequency traders (HFTs), making them the preponderant source of liquidity in the new market.

Many practices associated with the new stock market are highly controversial, as illustrated by the public furor following the publication of Michael Lewis’s book Flash Boys. Critics say that HFTs use their speed in discovering changes in the market and in altering their orders to take advantage of other traders. Dark pools – off-exchange trading venues that promise to keep the orders sent to them secret and to restrict the parties allowed to trade – are accused of operating in ways that injure many traders. Brokers are said to mishandle customer orders in an effort to maximize the payments they receive in return for sending trading venues their customers’ orders, rather than delivering best execution.

In this paper, we set out a simple, but powerful, conceptual framework for analyzing the new stock market. The framework is built upon three basic concepts: adverse selection, the principal-agent problem, and a multi-venue trading system. We illustrate the utility of this framework by analyzing the new market’s eight most controversial practices. The effects of each practice are evaluated in terms of the multiple social goals served by equity trading markets.

We ultimately conclude that there is no emergency requiring immediate, poorly-considered action. Some reforms proposed by critics, however, are clearly desirable. Other proposed reforms involve a tradeoff between two or more valuable social goals. In these cases, whether a reform is desirable may be unclear, but a better understanding of the tradeoff involved enables a more informed choice and suggests where further empirical research would be useful. Finally, still other proposed reforms are based on misunderstandings of the market or of the social impacts of a practice and should be avoided.
 
We are in an industry that thrives on the expedient of forecasting the future by extrapolating the past. As a consequence, investors have grown accustomed to the idea that stocks "normally" produce an 8% real return and a 5% risk premium over bonds, compounded annually over many decades. Why? Because long-term historical returns have been in this range, with impressive consistency. Because investors see these same long-term historical numbers, year after year, these expectations are now embedded into the collective psyche of the investment community.

Both figures are unrealistic from current market levels. Few have acknowledged that an important part of the lofty real returns of the past has stemmed from rising valuation levels and from high dividend yields which have since diminished. As this article will demonstrate, the long-term forward-looking risk premium is nowhere near the 5% of the past; indeed, it may well be near-zero today, perhaps even negative. Credible studies, in the US and overseas, are now challenging this flawed conventional view, in well-researched studies by Claus and Thomas [2001] and Fama and French [2000, Working Paper], to name just two. Similarly, the long-term forward-looking real return from stocks is nowhere near history's 8%. Our argument will show that, barring unprecedented economic growth or unprecedented growth in earnings as a percentage of the economy, real stock returns will probably be roughly 2-4%, similar to bonds. Indeed, even this low real return figure assumes that current near-record valuation levels are "fair," and likely to remain this high in the years ahead. "Reversion to the mean" would push future real returns lower still.

Furthermore, if we examine the historical record, neither the 8% real return nor the 5% risk premium for stocks relative to government bonds has ever been a realistic expectation (except from major market bottoms or at times of crisis, such as wartime). Should investors require an 8% real return, or should a 5% risk premium be necessary to induce an investor to bear stock market risk? These returns and risk premiums are so grand that investors should perhaps have bid them away a long time ago - indeed, they may have done so in the immense bull market of 1982-1999.

Intuition suggests that investors should not require such outsize returns, and the historical evidence supports this view. This is a topic meriting careful exploration. After all, according to the Ibbotson data, investors earned 8% real returns over the past 75 years, and stocks have outpaced bonds by nearly 5% over the past 75 years. So, why shouldn't investors have expected these returns in the past and why shouldn't they continue to do so? Expressed in a slightly different way, we examine two questions. First, can we derive an objective estimate of what investors should have had good reasons to have expected in the past? And, why should we expect less in the future than we've earned in the past?

The answers to both questions lie in the difference between the observed excess return and the prospective risk premium, two fundamentally different concepts that unfortunately carry the same label, "risk premium." If we distinguish between past excess returns and future expected risk premiums, it is not at all unreasonable that the future risk premiums should be different from past excess returns.

This is a complex topic, requiring several careful steps to evaluate correctly. To gauge the risk premium for stocks relative to bonds, we need an expected real stock return and an expected real bond return. To gauge the expected real bond return, we need both bond yields and an estimate of expected inflation through history. To gauge the expected real stock return, we need both stock dividend yields and an estimate of expected real dividend growth. Accordingly, we go through each of these steps, in reverse order, to form the building blocks for the final goal: an estimate of the objective, forward-looking equity risk premium, relative to bonds, through history.
 
All too often, the concept of risk-neutral probabilities in mathematical finance is poorly explained, and misleading statements are made. The aim of this paper is to provide an intuitive understanding of risk-neutral probabilities, and to explain in an easily accessible manner how they can be used for arbitrage-free asset pricing. The paper is meant as a stepping-stone to further reading for the beginning graduate student in finance.
 
Quite nice strategies have been shared here and each of them claims to be the best, it is being a difficult job t select one of them.
 
We decompose the squared VIX index, derived from US S&P500 options prices, into the conditional variance of stock returns and the equity variance premium. We evaluate a plethora of state-of-the-art volatility forecasting models to produce an accurate measure of the conditional variance. We then examine the predictive power of the VIX and its two components for stock market returns, economic activity and financial instability. The variance premium predicts stock returns while the conditional stock market variance predicts economic activity and has a relatively higher predictive power for financial instability than does the variance premium.
 
Technical stock analysis uses past prices and trading volume or both to predict future prices. A broad range of techniques such as chart analysis, moving averages, and other filters and oscillators can be used to identify predictable patterns in stock prices. The conventional wisdom is that stock-price patterns emerge from systematic psychological behavior of market participants. This note provides an overview of some common analytical tools for identifying trading opportunities.
 
There is a considerable body of research on relative strength price momentum but much less on absolute momentum, also known as time series momentum. In this paper, we explore the practical side of absolute momentum. We first explore its sole parameter - the formation, or look back, period. We then examine the reward, risk, and correlation characteristics of absolute momentum applied to stocks, bonds, and real assets. We finally apply absolute momentum to a 60/40 stock/bond portfolio and a simple risk parity portfolio. We show that absolute momentum can effectively identify regime change and add significant value as an easy-to-implement, rule-based approach with many potential uses as both a stand-alone program and trend-following overlay.
 

How News Trading Strategies Works?

Generally There are 2 ways of trading the news.

2. Long term Trading Strategies

Various academic studies have established that the impact of some news announcements have their immediate impact spread over a period of weeks and months, instead of the single day in which the markets are thought to discount them. Non-farm payrolls, and to a greater extent, the interest rate decisions of the federal reserve are good examples for this kind of news flow. While the markets react violently and unpredictably in the short term, the mechanisms set up by low interest rates, and full employment (or conversely, high unemployment) have consequences that are relevant to many sectors of the economy, and trading them on a long term basis is certainly possible. The trader who uses this strategy will build up his positions slowly, and will attach greater value to low frequency releases (such as GDP reports), and will wait until the overall picture offers clarity, before he makes his trade decisions.

3. Short term Trading Strategies

When trading news on a short term basis, the trader must have a clear criterion on what kind of news will justify a trade. Many news traders seek at least a 50 percent surprise in the data to consider the release tradeable. The novice trader, in turn, can use the initial period of his trading career for perfecting his money management skills. Trading the news on a short term basis can be easy and lucrative if the trader is disciplined enough to cut losses, and accumulate profits, but panic and mood swings, and undisciplined methodology will quickly erase all the gains through shocks and volatility.
 

Trading Systems

This paper approaches the opportunities for contrarian and momentum profits during the periods of high trading volume preceded by stock prices shocks. We investigate these aspects for ten stocks from New York Stock Exchange. We found that more than three quarters of the periods of high trading volume were preceded by shocks which occurred less than six working days before. The values of the average excess returns for these periods suggest that opportunities for momentum profits prevailed over those for contrarian profits.

 
Over the last few years an hypothesis of referendum about the presence in European Union (EU) was emerging in the United Kingdom (UK) based on several political and economic problems around Europe. Nowadays, the EU is the UK’s largest trade partner. For this reason, ‘Brexit’ would lower trade between both parties. The present research will quantify the impacts of ‘Brexit’ in the Monetary Financial Institutions’ (MFI’s) deposits with an asymmetric volatility verified in the currency market. Asymmetric GARCH-family models, such as the TARCH, will be used to modeling markets’ returns that are heavily affected by political events, like the ‘Brexit’. The analysis is subsequently extended to a Holt method for forecasting the Sight Deposits in UK MFI with fan chart. This research considers the amounts outstanding of sterling liabilities in the MFI’s balance sheet (excluding central bank). To determine the uncertainty in the fan charts we will consider the extreme asymmetric volatility in the currency market.
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