Quote from segv:
I am going to go out on a very long limb here and say that you have no idea what you are talking about. No one will talk about stat arb in detail?
Inference and Arbitrage: The Impact of Statistical Arbitrage on Stock Prices Tobias Adrian MIT
Testing Market Efficiency using Statistical Arbitrage with Applications to Momentum and Value Strategies S. Hogana, R. Jarrowb, M. Teoc*, M. Warachkad 2003
The Cointegration Alpha: Enhanced Index Tracking and Long-Short Equity Market Neutral Strategies ISMA Discussion Papers in Finance 2002
Cointegration and Asset Allocation: A New Active Hedge fund Strategy Carol Alexander 2001
A Computational Methodology for Modelling the Dynamics of Statistical Arbitrage Andrew Neil Burgess 1999 Phd thesis
Statistical Arbitrage and Securities Prices" Oleg Bondarenko University of Illinois at Chicago
High Frequency Pairs Trading with U.S. Treasury Securities: Risks and Rewards for Hedge Funds Purnendu Nath London Business School 2003
I have over 100 papers on the subject going back to 1988. Yes sir, there is definitely a lot of money still on the table here.
You are going out on a "very long limb here"...
Because I make a very good living pairs/basket trading for 14 years...
And profits lost through decimalization have been made up through low costs and higher volume...
And the changes in the last few months have had little impact on quants...
In fact, may still end up being a net plus.
And at the heart of the Bright operation is a strong focus on this...
In fact, the web site pairstrading.com = Bright Vancouver office.
The fact that you can find a bunch of academics to address an issue is a Big Yawn...
They are amateurs.
Try getting pro traders to talk about it.
Look at this thread.
90 pages and 110,000 views...
And virtually no useful, specific information on this area.
That's what I mean.
Getting this kind of approach to work is a matter of trial and error and experience...
And expert application is everything...
Meaning (a) proprietary software and (b) expert traders.
Other than basic concepts...
You cannot get this out of a book...
Or run off-the-shelf software...
You have to invent and build and create and constantly tweak over the years.
I could come up with literally dozens, if not 100s, of workable groups of stock to trade/hedge...
Some would work better than others...
But I have more than enough action to keep me busy for the foreseeable future.
Even is I posted a 10 page exact explanation in detail of what I do...
Maybe 1% of the people here could duplicate what I do...
And it would take that 1% at least 6-12 months to be up and running.
But because the basic idea is always that you are arbing less efficient areas of the markets...
Certain niches regularly get saturated and cease to be profitable...
So, in that sense, your point is correct.
For example...
I traded convertibles very profitably for 2 years 2000-1...
But since the convertible niche got hammered by the tech meltdown in 2002...
And the energy meltdown in 2003...
It's not very tradeable... and I have long since moved on.
Staying ahead of the curve here is paramount...
And that requires ongoing creativity.