Intro to Algorithmic Trading

Here is a quick glance at algorithmic trading:

3 basic components:

1. math background: probability theories, stochastic processes, real analysis, PDE, ODE, mental math.

2. finance background: mostly pricing theories and models; BSM models;

3. programming skills: Python and C++;


A few starting points in trading strategies:

websites: zipline and quantopian;
blogs: Gekkoquant ;
           Quantstart

Brexit voting by county in the U.K.

 Brexit vote in different county has exactly the same correlation with the mad cow disease in 1992.

There are some people say this is a joke and fake map.

Monday Madness

http://nyti.ms/1L1DC2C


Monday, today. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced his race into the Republican Party for the 2016 Pres. Campaign. Very interesting. I'm sitting down here and will just wait to see how far he will go. He is a hot contender for the pres race now actually. I am of course not supporting Walker, of course. I'm a democratic. But I hope to see how far Walker can go. If I recall correctly, were he to win, Walker would be the first U.S. president ascending from Governor of Wisconsin position.

American economics, American economists

My personal interpretation of economics is that economics studies the scarcity of the resources and achieve the the maximum social welfare - it is extremely abstract, yet economists are trained by a very complete and comprehensive set of rules.

An article by Harvard professor Sendhil Mullainathan on NYTimes recently caught my attention. In this Upshot article, Professor confessed his bittersweet feels when he knew some talented economics students started working in finance and investment banks, as he puts it "the young minds are too easy to be taken advantage of by the financial industry". However one would deem the feel, I definitely put it in a very compounded way.

I recently graduated from an Economics program, and started working at a technology company. Despite the good offer and the golden H1-B visa sponsorship, I will be trained to become a BI developer. The job is oriented for solving F-500 company data base problems and learn to manage data sets and data warehouse. I assumed I'd learn economics-relevant programming skills, but the company structural as a for-profit organization is bit annoyingly troublesome. Well, I guess I just gotta get on the ball and wait to see what will happen.

In this job year break between graduate school and the PhD program, my ideal type of job is to work in a research institute as a research assistant. I got a research data set test from several places as part of the application for RA. I did my best and enjoyed so much about the process, and I hoped that I could just get into one as I know the selection process is always tough. Some professor in the economics department (A very famous one in his field, not mentioning his name here) is not cooperative in helping me getting into one position. As someone who has no connections and no relative in the U.S., the international student like me who wants to survive and live in the U.S. is extremely difficult. It is not fair for the professors who could help some but refuse to lend a hand; but rather sit on their ass and think that sorry I couldn't help and such, which makes me feel kind of bad. But on the other side of the equation, it makes a lot of sense to see that actually if people believe in a good candidate, the good candidate's work should speak for itself. In consideration of this, it is probably fair to report.

Inequality from a trade perspective

Stiglitz news article has argued that the increasing inequalities in the U.S. is alarming, and harming the most useful resources in the country - its people. Thomas Piketty and Janet Yellen has also raised the topic of inequality onto the table. This is my reactions to the Stiglitz arguments for inequality from trade emphasized perspective.

Joseph Stiglitz argued that the most clear trend in America is the alarming expanding inequality - "concentration of income and wealth at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, and increasing poverty at the bottom". It is difficult to attribute this completely to one reason that leads to the exacerbating inequality, from the global perspective however, one can find several possible sources this income inequality can stem from.

As America is well endowed with capital and America trade based on its comparative advantage, naturally the main American exports are capital-intensive goods, which benefits the capital owners. Since most capital owners in America are the richest people in the country, the international trade will benefit the richest people who are the top 1% of the population, while make the working people worse off. The reallocation and condemnation of wealth is exacerbated by the cycle in which the richest people can invest more capital and export capital-intensive goods which bring them more wealth. The globalization makes the world much more tightened in trade, which also incentivize American capital owners to more heavily rely on trade to increase welfare and income, which benefit the richest American people. Moreover, severe rent-seeking in economy makes the inequality more deteriorated -- companies use monopoly powers and CEOs use political connections to influence policies and maximize their earnings.

It is not surprising that inequality rises during economic development. Growth and trade induces rent-seeking which distort the economies, also the market plays a role in resulting in inequality - the market is influenced by policies, policies are affected by politics and government, which eventually is shaped by money. Growing inequality is not inevitable. It is argued that there are some countries that are doing better in terms of both GDP and living standards while reducing the inequalities. This inequality triggers a higher economic growth thanks to the rich and superrich and everyone can get a larger share of the economic benefits. However, while the economy is growing together, the economy is also starting to grow apart.

To resolve the inequality in the U.S. is a difficult task. Helpman in his book suggested that reducing the price of the most commonly consumed goods, are redistribute tax income to the poor is a method to mitigate the situation of inequality. This government lump-sum tax regime ensures the individuals are equally well off in the trade regime as in autarky. This lump-sum tax can also bring a budget surplus according to Dixit and Norman, a necessary condition for a policy to be implementable. With this policy in place, every individual faces in the trading equilibrium the same opportunities and tradeoff as in autarky, and therefore every individual ends up choosing the autarky consumption that yields the autarky welfare level. Compared to trading situation where the rich and superrich get the most benefit of trade, the lump-sum tax regime makes the poor people relatively better off. The Dixit-Norman policy involves substantial distortions stemming from collecting tax, which shrinks the amount available for distribution. Nevertheless, this benefit amount is large enough for people to consume more than in autarky. As this policy suggested that the tax is collected as extra amount from the trading situation, the redistributed amount is the increase in welfare compared to autarky. Thus the poor people have increased opportunities and welfare, and this welfare will additionally generate more economic growth through consumptions by the people receiving this tax transfer.

Stiglitz alarmed the U.S. for its pressing social inequality problems. I analyzed the causes of this issue from trade perspective and provided a proposal to alleviate this inequality.

Trading partner of Germany

In my recent research of relationship between trade and currency. I study the effect of settlement currency on the trading volume, specifically I measure how much the uniform settlement currency will increase or decrease the trading volume. 

I come up with this graph.

I'm currently studying the trading partners of Germany only. 

DUE-CHE and DUE-GBR are the control groups.

My regression results are bit counter-intuitive and reverse to my assumptions. Can anyone make an educated guess of if a uniform settlement currency can increase or decrease trading volume on the countries?

USD going strong

NYTimes blog post Upshot has really informational interpretations on the US dollars lately appreciation. Upshot posts really really funny and nice information about politics, economies, sports etc., that is really easy to read and entertaining. I extremely highly recommend to follow it.


The NYTimes article listed two graphs: one is USD vs. major currencies values since July; and the other is economic growth outlook for major economies.

In the first graph, USD is appreciating against all major currencies with the exception of CNY. The appreciation is almost 8% for the major currencies in 3 months. (For CNY, it is depreicating by about 2%). On the economy side, US GDP growth is increasing by more than 0.5% compared to expectations. Other economies such as EU is growing slower by -0.3% compared to expectations, Germany, France are below expectations and Japan is the slowest with -0.7% relative to expectations.

This has true economic impact. USD is now becoming the most sought after currency in the world lately. This means investors are having better prospect for the US economy. In addition, the US economies are expanding at 4.5% qoq and believed to be stronger than expectation. NY Fed Chairman William Dudley for the first time confirmed the real impact on the economy.

US exports statistics since July is here. Stronger USD should lead to a mitigated exports. But data in July and August hasn't show any slow down in exports. I predict that exporting business is definitely getting affected in contract volume. Perhaps it is going to take some time to show this trend in data and this trend will appear in the next few months.

A more in depth analysis can be found on this blog.