There’s a study that has been doing the rounds for some time called “Do Global Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?” In the study, the authors come to the conclusion that most stocks fail to beat the return on cash (1-month Treasury bills). In fact, across a sample of 62,000 global stocks between 1990-2018, 56% of US […]
What Did I Buy In September?
If you read last month’s update you will know that I recently started a new investing portfolio called ‘Zero To One Million’. This is a project where I am attempting to hit $1 million in equity through the process of investing a small amount (typically $1000 – $1500) into one or two different stocks each […]
How Do Stocks React To Blockchain Announcements?
Recently a study called Bitcoin Speculation or Value Creation was published looking at how individual stocks react to the news that their firm is investing in blockchain technology. The authors found an average price gain of nearly 15% after the first announcement but this is typically followed by a price reversal over the following three […]
Testing A Reader’s RSI Trading Strategy
A reader asked if I could backtest a trading strategy based on the RSI(2) technical indicator. Most RSI strategies trade mean reversion setups, however, this is actually a trend following strategy. The idea is to follow trends and use an RSI(2) pullback to get a better price entry. We wait for the RSI(2) to turn back […]
26 Stock Market Strategies That Beat Buy And Hold
Profitable stock market strategies are not easy to come by. One proven path is to seek out stock market anomalies. A stock market anomaly is a rate of return or investment strategy that seems to defy the efficient market hypothesis. Today, most investors agree that markets are fairly efficient even if they don’t believe in […]
Only Optimists Make Money In Stocks
I came across the following quote on Twitter: Unless you’re a perennial short seller, pessimism about the future is of no help. Only optimists make money in the markets. D Mutukrishnan Mutukrishnan has a great way of words and I think this quote is very true. If you’re too pessimistic about the market you’re going […]
August Stock Picks And Updates: Amazon And Alibaba
First off, a few updates. You may have noticed that this website now has a shiny new name, Decoding Markets! The old one, jbmarwood.com, was too ambiguous and made me sound like an author of fantasy novels. Decoding Markets reflects the new direction that I want this blog to go in. It’s not about me, […]
Can You Improve Trend Following Strategies With Price To Earnings?
In a previous article we looked at the effects of introducing price to earnings data to a mean reversion strategy. Although the effects were quite small, we found that we could improve a simple RSI strategy by avoiding stocks with negative PE ratios. We also found that stocks with PE ratios over 15 produced higher […]
Should You Combine Trading Strategies?
The general advice with trading systems is that you should try to combine multiple trading strategies together in order to get the benefit of diversification. Having a suite of profitable trading algorithms means that you can obtain a smoother drawdown and reduce your chance of having a losing day, week, month, year. However, is it […]
Improving Mean Reversion Strategies With Price To Earnings
I’ve always wondered whether you can improve a trading strategy by including fundamentals. For example, should you trade mean reversion stocks with a low PE or a high PE? Most mean reversion strategies use technical indicators and the RSI(2) and RSI(3) indicators are particularly popular among traders. However, there isn’t much research on combining those […]
