From a leading trading systems developer, how to make profitable trades when there are no obvious trends How does a trader find alpha when markets make no sense, when price shocks cause diversification to fail, and when it seems impossible to hedge? What strategies should traders, long conditioned to trend trading, deploy? In Alpha Trading: Profitable Strategies That Remove Directional Risk, author Perry Kaufman presents strategies and systems for profitably trading in directionless markets and in those experiencing constant price shocks. The book Details how to exploit new highs and lows Describes how to hedge primary risk components, find robustness, and craft a diversification program Other titles by Kaufman: New Trading Systems and Methods, 4th Edition and A Short Course in Technical Trading, both by Wiley Given Kaufman's 30 years of experience trading in almost every kind of market, his Alpha Trading will be a welcome addition to the trading literature of professional and serious individual traders for years to come.
Trading is a chaotic, complex, and loosely-structured game played by the smartest minds and most expensive computers in the world. It is the ultimate puzzle. Few can trade at an elite level for an extended period. The game is constantly changing and the rules, mechanics, and probabilities are difficult to observe and forever in flux. Just when you think you've got a plan: BAM. You get punched in the mouth. Trading attracts intelligent, driven individuals who see enormous financial rewards and few barriers to entry. But no amount of intelligence or skill is enough if you are irrational, undisciplined, or overconfident. The best analysis is useless if you keep reaching for the self-destruct button. How do you survive and excel in this high-stakes competition? How do you become an Alpha Trader? The answer is mindset, methodology, and math. ALPHA TRADER is not a behavioral economics textbook and it is not a boring, theoretical deep dive into trading psychology. It's a practical guide full of actionable information, exciting and relevant trading floor stories, concisely-distilled research, and real-life examples that explain and reinforce critical concepts. The book details the specific strategies, tactics, and habits that lead to professional trading success. It will help you become more self-aware, rational, and profitable. This book will make you a better trader. It will help you unlock more edge and it will motivate you to become an expert in your market. It covers practical and essential topics like strategy vs. tactics, microstructure, market narrative, technical analysis, sentiment, positioning and systematic risk management. It will explain the importance of adaptation, rational thinking, behavioral bias, and risk of ruin. Brent Donnelly, the author of ALPHA TRADER, has been a professional trader for more than two decades and has been writing about macro and markets for more than 15 years. His writing style is engaging, approachable, and entertaining and he has the experience and knowledge of a veteran professional trader. His first book, The Art of Currency Trading is a bestseller and has received rave reviews. Brent has worked as a senior FX dealer at some of the biggest banks in the world. He has traded global macro for a Connecticut hedge fund, and he has day traded equities with his own money. He loves trading and he loves writing about it. ALPHA TRADER is for traders of every skill and experience level. Veterans and rookies alike will benefit as the book digs into topics like self-awareness, discipline, endurance, and grit. Learn the common traits of winning traders, the myriad sources of trader kryptonite, how to improve your decision-making, and how smart people do stupid things, all the time. Professional trading is a lifelong journey of self-improvement, struggle, adaptation, and success. This book will help you level up on that journey. Be rational and self-aware. Learn, adapt, and grow. Unleash the Alpha.
Innovative trading strategies, which combine the use of technical analysis, market indicators, and options In the new world of investing, money managers must deal with a variety of dynamics, products, analyses, and risk controls. They are also expected to achieve above-benchmark performance and profits, also known as alpha, as well as protect capital in the process. This can be difficult to achieve in today's turbulent market environment, but with Increasing Alpha with Options, author Scott Fullman, the Director of Derivative Investment Strategy for WJB Capital Group, offers some solid solutions. Written in a straightforward and accessible style, this reliable resource outlines various trading strategies using a combination of technical analysis, market indicators, and options. Along the way, it skillfully details how these analytical techniques can help you capture profits while also protecting positions from adverse market conditions. Details the varying elements of technical analysis, from chart type and analysis period to time itself Highlights how to build strategies around reversal and continuation patterns, oscillators, and exchange-traded funds Reveals how you can exploit small inefficiencies in the options marketplace Filled with in-depth insights and expert advice, Increasing Alpha with Options will quickly familiarize you with everything from the various elements of technical analysis to leveraging the power of options, and show you how applying these tools and techniques to your trading or investing endeavors can improve overall performance.
An all-inclusive guide to trend following As more and more savvy investors move into the space, trend following has become one of the most popular investment strategies. Written for investors and investment managers, Trend Following with Managed Futures offers an insightful overview of both the basics and theoretical foundations for trend following. The book also includes in-depth coverage of more advanced technical aspects of systematic trend following. The book examines relevant topics such as: Trend following as an alternative asset class Benchmarking and factor decomposition Applications for trend following in an investment portfolio And many more By focusing on the investor perspective, Trend Following with Managed Futures is a groundbreaking and invaluable resource for anyone interested in modern systematic trend following.
The ultimate behind-the-curtain look at the hedge fund industry, unlocking the most valuable stories, secrets, and lessons directly from those who have played the game best. Written by Maneet Ahuja, the hedge fund industry insider, The Alpha Masters brings the secretive world of hedge funds into the light of day for the first time. As the authority that the biggest names in the business, including John Paulson, David Tepper, and Bill Ackman, go to before breaking major news, Ahuja has access to the innermost workings of the hedge fund industry. For the first time, in Alpha Masters, Ahuja provides both institutional and savvy private investors with tangible, analytical insight into the psychology of the trade, the strategies and investment criteria serious money managers use to determine and evaluate their positions, and special guidance on how the reader can replicate this success themselves. There are few people with access to the inner chambers of the hedge fund industry, and as a result it remains practically uncharted financial territory. Alpha Masters changes all that, shedding light on star fund managers and how exactly they consistently outperform the market. The book: Contains easy-to-follow chapters that are broken down by strategy--Long/Short, Event Arbitrage, Value, Macro, Distressed, Quantitative, Commodities, Activist, pure Short, Fund of Funds. Includes insights from the biggest names in the trading game, including Ray Dalio, Marc Lasry, Jim Chanos, Sonia Gardner, Pierre Lagrange, and Tim Wong. Features contributions from industry icon Mohamed El-Erian Many of the subjects profiled in this groundbreaking new book have never spoken so candidly about their field, providing extremely provocative, newsworthy analysis of today's investing landscape.
Now you can master the art of foreign exchange trading While most currency trading and foreign exchange books focus on international finance theory or simplistic chart-based strategies, The Art of Currency Trading is a comprehensive guide that will teach you how to profitably trade currencies in the real world. Author Brent Donnelly has been a successful interbank FX trader for more than 20 years and in this book, he shares the specific strategies and tactics he has used to profit in the forex marketplace. The book helps investors understand and master foreign exchange trading in order to achieve sustainable long-term financial success. The book builds in intensity and depth one topic at a time, starting with the basics and moving on to intermediate then advanced setups and strategies. Whether you are new to currency trading or have years of experience, The Art of Currency Trading provides the information you need to learn to trade like an expert. This much-needed guide provides: an insider’s view of what drives currency price movements; a clear explanation of how to combine macro fundamentals, technical analysis, behavioral finance and diligent risk management to trade successfully; specific techniques and setups you can use to make money trading foreign exchange; and steps you can take to better understand yourself and improve your trading psychology and discipline. Written for currency traders of all skill levels, international stock and bond investors, corporate treasurers, commodity traders, and asset managers, The Art of Currency Trading offers a comprehensive guide to foreign exchange trading written by a noted expert in the field.
Inside The Black Box The Simple Truth About Quantitative Trading Rishi K Narang Praise for Inside the Black Box "In Inside the Black Box: The Simple Truth About Quantitative Trading, Rishi Narang demystifies quantitative trading. His explanation and classification of alpha will enlighten even a seasoned veteran." ?Blair Hull, Founder, Hull Trading & Matlock Trading "Rishi provides a comprehensive overview of quantitative investing that should prove useful both to those allocating money to quant strategies and those interested in becoming quants themselves. Rishi's experience as a well-respected quant fund of funds manager and his solid relationships with many practitioners provide ample useful material for his work." ?Peter Muller, Head of Process Driven Trading, Morgan Stanley "A very readable book bringing much needed insight into a subject matter that is not often covered. Provides a framework and guidance that should be valuable to both existing investors and those looking to invest in this area for the first time. Many quants should also benefit from reading this book." ?Steve Evans, Managing Director of Quantitative Trading, Tudor Investment Corporation "Without complex formulae, Narang, himself a leading practitioner, provides an insightful taxonomy of systematic trading strategies in liquid instruments and a framework for considering quantitative strategies within a portfolio. This guide enables an investor to cut through the hype and pretense of secrecy surrounding quantitative strategies." ?Ross Garon, Managing Director, Quantitative Strategies, S.A.C. Capital Advisors, L.P. "Inside the Black Box is a comprehensive, yet easy read. Rishi Narang provides a simple framework for understanding quantitative money management and proves that it is not a black box but rather a glass box for those inside." ?Jean-Pierre Aguilar, former founder and CEO, Capital Fund Management "This book is great for anyone who wants to understand quant trading, without digging in to the equations. It explains the subject in intuitive, economic terms." ?Steven Drobny, founder, Drobny Global Asset Management, and author, Inside the House of Money "Rishi Narang does an excellent job demystifying how quants work, in an accessible and fun read. This book should occupy a key spot on anyone's bookshelf who is interested in understanding how this ever increasing part of the investment universe actually operates." ?Matthew S. Rothman, PhD, Global Head of Quantitative Equity Strategies Barclays Capital "Inside the Black Box provides a comprehensive and intuitive introduction to "quant" strategies. It succinctly explains the building blocks of such strategies and how they fit together, while conveying the myriad possibilities and design details it takes to build a successful model driven investment strategy." ?Asriel Levin, PhD, Managing Member, Menta Capital, LLC
Leverage machine learning to design and back-test automated trading strategies for real-world markets using pandas, TA-Lib, scikit-learn, LightGBM, SpaCy, Gensim, TensorFlow 2, Zipline, backtrader, Alphalens, and pyfolio. Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in the PDF format. Key FeaturesDesign, train, and evaluate machine learning algorithms that underpin automated trading strategiesCreate a research and strategy development process to apply predictive modeling to trading decisionsLeverage NLP and deep learning to extract tradeable signals from market and alternative dataBook Description The explosive growth of digital data has boosted the demand for expertise in trading strategies that use machine learning (ML). This revised and expanded second edition enables you to build and evaluate sophisticated supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning models. This book introduces end-to-end machine learning for the trading workflow, from the idea and feature engineering to model optimization, strategy design, and backtesting. It illustrates this by using examples ranging from linear models and tree-based ensembles to deep-learning techniques from cutting edge research. This edition shows how to work with market, fundamental, and alternative data, such as tick data, minute and daily bars, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, financial news, or satellite images to generate tradeable signals. It illustrates how to engineer financial features or alpha factors that enable an ML model to predict returns from price data for US and international stocks and ETFs. It also shows how to assess the signal content of new features using Alphalens and SHAP values and includes a new appendix with over one hundred alpha factor examples. By the end, you will be proficient in translating ML model predictions into a trading strategy that operates at daily or intraday horizons, and in evaluating its performance. What you will learnLeverage market, fundamental, and alternative text and image dataResearch and evaluate alpha factors using statistics, Alphalens, and SHAP valuesImplement machine learning techniques to solve investment and trading problemsBacktest and evaluate trading strategies based on machine learning using Zipline and BacktraderOptimize portfolio risk and performance analysis using pandas, NumPy, and pyfolioCreate a pairs trading strategy based on cointegration for US equities and ETFsTrain a gradient boosting model to predict intraday returns using AlgoSeek's high-quality trades and quotes dataWho this book is for If you are a data analyst, data scientist, Python developer, investment analyst, or portfolio manager interested in getting hands-on machine learning knowledge for trading, this book is for you. This book is for you if you want to learn how to extract value from a diverse set of data sources using machine learning to design your own systematic trading strategies. Some understanding of Python and machine learning techniques is required.
As an original innovator of the portable alpha concept, PIMCO has been managing an increasing number of different portable alpha strategies for investors since 1986. And now, with Portable Alpha Theory and Practice, the PIMCO team shares their extensive experiences with you. Filled with in-depth insights and expert guidance, this reliable resource provides an informative look at portable alpha and key related concepts, as well as detailed discussion on the many ways it can be applied in real-world situations.
