Fully automated futures trading

Let me add that it looked like I closed out at literally the last hour. I bought back 14.3 this morning, VIX is at 17.3 now. Total saving £30k. Thanks everyone!

Still did -6% today, total drawdown 14.5% from hwm last week.


Fortuitous timing on your decision with spot VIX moving from 17 to 37 today!

Hope everyone did well, or at least not too badly, after last night.
 
Honestly, I've never been so lucky in my life. Literally the last hour. Very, very fortunate indeed.

-19% from HWM. System is cutting back, but still strongly long equities.

Sometimes being lucky is better than being good :-)

I've mulled various 'proper' ways of dealing with the skew/ kurtosis of the VIX in considering position sizes; keeping a relatively small allocation certainly helps, as does applying a vol floor, but I also wonder whether one should use some kind of percentile value of historic volatility rather than the standard deviation. Any such method will mean you undershoot your target risk on VIX / V2X most of the time however. Perhaps it is better to just give it a smaller risk allocation, and deal with the downside when it happens.

You do after all get paid for being short vol, in the long term.

I'm currently at -12.3% from HWM FWIW

Here is last nights risk report, would have budged slightly today (in particular the VIX / V2X positions - had I been holding them - would have reduced sharply. I have a manual price protection which filters out larger price movements until manually checked - this normally goes off once a year, but went off every hour for vol as the moves were around 10 - 15 standard deviations).

It's flat equities, short bonds; and long some commodity stuff which unfortunately are still correlated with equities.

Code:
      code  multisignal  expected_annual_risk  
16      V2X        -16.4                 0 [override]
17      VIX        -20.8                 0 [override]
22   NASDAQ          0.0                     0                        
2   LIVECOW         -0.0                    12                       
21      SMI          0.0                     0                              
19      AEX          0.0                     0                             
8       BTP          0.0                     0                              
11    SHATZ          0.0                     0                          
20      CAC          0.0                     0                            
23    SP500          0.0                     0                          
37  EUROSTX          0.0                     0                      [actually short in equity hedge]
18    KOSPI          0.0                     0                          

14     US20         -0.9                   606                         
13      US2         -1.1                   750                         
6       KR3         -2.0                  1380                          
15      US5         -3.1                  2191                         
7      BOBL         -1.5                  1050                         
12     US10         -3.3                  2323                        
5      KR10         -6.0                  4199                         
9      BUND         -5.8                  4049                        
10      OAT         -7.7                  5425                        
36  EDOLLAR        -16.6                 11613                 
0      CORN        -13.9                  9709                      
4     WHEAT        -16.5                 11578                    


1   LEANHOG          1.1                   801                     
24      AUD          8.3                  5824                         
27      JPY          4.6                  3214                          
30   COPPER          7.4                  5180                    
25      EUR          8.7                  6122                         
29      NZD         10.3                  7215                        
31     GOLD          2.0                  1418                       
33     PLAT         10.7                  7466                       
26      GBP          9.2                  6432                        
35   GAS_US          9.1                  6354                    
3   SOYBEAN         12.4                  8683                  
28      MXP         19.8                 13893                      
32   PALLAD         19.6                 13712                    
34  CRUDE_W         19.8                 13861

GAT
 
Did you manually take off equities or did the system do that? The reason I ask is because my system was staying very long for equities, and finally I had enough & shut them all myself.

re: Vix/Vstoxx, I concluded it wasn't fair to lump these in with trend following, as the return distribution isn't what you'd expect (trend + gaussian noise).
 
Did you manually take off equities or did the system do that? The reason I ask is because my system was staying very long for equities, and finally I had enough & shut them all myself.

re: Vix/Vstoxx, I concluded it wasn't fair to lump these in with trend following, as the return distribution isn't what you'd expect (trend + gaussian noise).

The system took them off.

GAT
 
I wonder if anyone has tested a "volatility filter" within their system?

Meaning that for market shocks like we are currently moving through the system could be programmed to ignore position changes when market volatility is over a certain level. The rational being that volatility begets more volatility and we can expect some recovery.

I may be talking my own book :)
 
The system took them off.

GAT

Any idea which rule dominated that decision?

My own rule weights are:

rule_weights = {'carry': 1.0761308295764749,
'ewmac16': 0.94565802638498464,
'ewmac32': 0.97404151565516006,
'ewmac64': 1.037272611390585,
'ewmac8': 0.96689706277925536,
}
 
Any idea which rule dominated that decision?

My own rule weights are:

rule_weights = {'carry': 1.0761308295764749,
'ewmac16': 0.94565802638498464,
'ewmac32': 0.97404151565516006,
'ewmac64': 1.037272611390585,
'ewmac8': 0.96689706277925536,
}

I don't have the diagnostics to easily check, but my weights for SP500 are:

Code:
    SP500
breakout10    0
breakout20    0.143
breakout40    0.1144
breakout80    0.0286
breakout160    0.02145
breakout320    0.05005
mrinasset80    0.02
mrinasset160    0.08
carry10    0.08
carry30    0.06
carry60    0.04
carry125    0.02
assettrend2    0
assettrend4    0.039
assettrend8    0.0312
assettrend16    0.0078
assettrend32    0.00585
assettrend64    0.01365
normmom2    0
normmom4    0.039
normmom8    0.0312
normmom16    0.0078
normmom32    0.00585
normmom64    0.01365
momentum2    0
momentum4    0.039
momentum8    0.0312
momentum16    0.0078
momentum32    0.00585
momentum64    0.01365
relcarry    0.05
 
From the FT today:

"Trend-following quantitative hedge funds were among the biggest victims of the current market turmoil, wiping out much of their 2018 gains in two torrid days of trading and undercutting their status as risk-mitigation tools. Surging global share prices during January lured in more money from computer-driven hedge funds that ride market momentum, but the sudden eruption of volatility triggered abrupt losses for many of the industry’s biggest players. “The rally had accelerated, and we kind of knew an accident would happen, but it’s never pretty when it does,” said David Harding, the head of Winton Capital, one of the biggest such funds in the industry. “We’ve had a couple of painfully bad days . . . This will go down as one of the weeks one remembers.” Mr Harding said Winton’s funds were down 3 per cent to 4 per cent over Monday and Tuesday, their worst short-term performance in five years, according to the hedge fund manager. Yet Winton’s funds use relatively little leverage and the pain is likely to have been more intense elsewhere. "
 
Trend following strategies tend to have negative skew on the daily timescale as mentioned in this thread many pages earlier. On the monthly scale the skew is positive however.
 
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