Publications by systematicinvestor
Clustering with selected Principal Components
In the Visualizing Principal Components post, I looked at the Principal Components of the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average index over 2012. Today, I want to show how we can use Principal Components to create Clusters (i.e. form groups of similar companies based on their distance from each other) Let’s start by loading the historica...
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More Principal Components Fun
Today, I want to continue with the Principal Components theme and show how the Principal Component Analysis can be used to build portfolios that are not correlated to the market. Most of the content for this post is based on the excellent article, “Using PCA for spread trading” by Jev Kuznetsov. Let’s start by loading the components of the ...
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Examples of Current Major Market Clusters
I want to follow up and provide a bit more details to the excellent “A Visual of Current Major Market Clusters” post by David Varadi. Let’s first load historical for the 10 major asset classes: Gold ( GLD ) US Dollar ( UUP ) S&P500 ( SPY ) Nasdaq100 ( QQQ ) Small Cap ( IWM ) Emerging Markets ( EEM ) International Equity ( EFA ) Real Estate...
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Optimal number of clusters
In the last post, Examples of Current Major Market Clusters, we looked at clustering Major Markets into 4 groups based on their correlations in 2012. Today, I want to continue with clustering theme and discuss methods of selecting number of clusters. I will look at the following methods of selecting optimal number of clusters: Minimum number of ...
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Weekend Reading – S&P 500 Visual History
Michael Johnston at the ETF Database shared a very interesting post with me over the holidays. The S&P 500 Visual History – is an interactive post that shows the top 10 components in the S&P 500 each year, going back to 1980. On a different note, Judson Bishop contributed a plota.recession() function to add recession bars to the existing plot....
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Tracking Number of Historical Clusters
In the prior post, Optimal number of clusters, we looked at methods of selecting number of clusters. Today, I want to continue with clustering theme and show historical Number of Clusters time series using these methods. In particular, I will look at the following methods of selecting optimal number of clusters: Minimum number of clusters that e...
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An Example of Seasonality Analysis
Today, I want to demonstrate how easy it is to create a seasonality analysis study and produce a sample summary report. As an example study, I will use S&P Annual Performance After a Big January post by Avondale Asset Management. The first step is to load historical prices and find Big Januaries. ##################################################...
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Tracking Number of Historical Clusters in DOW 30 and S&P 500
In the Tracking Number of Historical Clusters post, I looked at how 3 different methods were able to identify clusters across the 10 major asset universe. Today, I want to share the impact of clustering on the larger universe. Below I examined the historical time series of number of clusters in the DOW 30 and S&P 500 indices. I went back to the 1...
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Cluster Portfolio Allocation
Today, I want to continue with clustering theme and show how the portfolio weights are determined in the Cluster Portfolio Allocation method. One example of the Cluster Portfolio Allocation method is Cluster Risk Parity (Varadi, Kapler, 2012). The Cluster Portfolio Allocation method has 3 steps: Create Clusters Allocate funds within each Cluste...
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Single Stock Plot Shiny web application
Today, I want to share the Single Stock Plot application (code at GitHub). This is the first application in the series of examples (I plan to share 5 examples) that will demonstrate the amazing Shiny framework and Systematic Investor Toolbox to analyze stocks, make back-tests, and create summary reports. The motivation for this series of posts is...
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