Helix Partners

[Disclaimer: Market commentary posts are non-professional in nature.  To they extent they have any investable opinions, they do not indicate anything about the content of the Helix portfolio.  Helix uses a systematic process and will never make any discretionary investments based on these market views.]

Consensus this week was simply to worry. Worry about macro numbers from the US, worry about continuing Euro-zone debt problems and worry at home that our Chinese friends might slow purchase our golden soil.

Europe: Despite the Euro zone finance ministers giving their final approval to the $520bn rescue package the market has all but conceded that Greece will (in some form) default.  Gold continued to break record ground and be an appealing refuge.

China: Strong export data from China yesterday inspired a sigh of collective relief, placating the general jitters after May’s disappointing manufacturing numbers.  It would seem that the imploding Euro zone (China’s biggest customer) might not bring down the mighty Chinese exporting dragon…yet.  Reports of rising wages for striking factory workers might also be the first emergence of a middle class that will have buying power significant to make China a self-subsistent economic story.  This is great news for Australia, but it also highlights the potential tipping point of labour availability in the Chinese manufacturing sector.

Australia: The RSPT public mess is continuing to look messy to foreign investment.  It continues to act as a reason to repatriate investment back to the US.  Falls in the Australian market this week were continually on low volume with investors frozen stiff, not knowing whether to crystallize their losses into EOFY or hold strong and wait for the rally.  Therefore we’ve simply seen a reflection of US moves every day.

US: Even the flag waving and cheer-leading of Ben Bernanke couldn’t suppress the worry in the US.  His commentary on Tuesday was heartening, but realistic: “My best guess is we will have a continued recovery, but it won’t feel terrific.” Nevertheless, economic data in recent months have suggested that the economy is recovering. Jobs are being created, manufacturing has consistently expanded and inflation remains tame.   A solid string of good news could turn this sentiment around very quickly.

Clearly it is a time to weigh top-down analysis.  Fundamentals have less bearing on the trading movements of the market right now.  The most robust investment models will be those that can adapt to dynamic market environments.  Approaching the problem from the right perspective is sometimes more important than deciding the method used to solve it. The current market uncertainty highlights the benefits of having a portion of your portfolio as market neutral exposure.  It is exactly the times when “any news is scary news” that you want the comforting confidence of being invested in uncorrelated return streams.

As a leaving point for the long weekend (please excuse the photographic quality) – Walking down Sydney’s retail Mecca, Castlereagh Street, today, I spotted the best example of the global economy:

Note: For lease sign, a major international bank, and a “we buy gold” backpacker. Ben’s right, it may indeed not “feel terrific”!!

Well, we’ve missed the end of 2009, but nonetheless here’s the 4th Part of our Q42009 research update. For this installment, we’ve uploaded 25 new papers to our reference database about some of the problems that are part of trying to model a high-dimensional, noisy, non-stationary domain like the stock market. Suffice it to say there are many.

The first set of papers in this update deal with the ‘curse of dimensionality’. One of the biggest issues with modeling stock returns, ironically, is the great amount of data we have available to throw at the problem. A lot of this is relevant information and needs to be added to a good model. However, many of these individual pieces of data will either have statistically significant relationships to each other or turn out to have no relationship to stock returns at all. Both cases will give extra degrees of freedom to an algorithm that will seriously affect its ability to find the meaningful information in a data set and its relationship to stock returns. Worse, even if we are only including good information in a model, many algorithms scale poorly as the size of their problem grows. With a limit on our computing power and time, this is a big issue.

There are two major solutions to this problem that involve pre-processing data before it is sent to a classification algorithm. The first is called feature selection and involves identifying the set of features in a data set that are important for prediction and discarding the rest. This is the approach taken by Eugene Tuv et al in their November 2009 paper “Feature Selection with Ensembles, Artificial Variables, and Redundancy Elimination”. Improvising on this theme, Krupka, Navot, and Tishby choose a subset of features with the novel idea of learning the meta-properties of a good feature in “Learning to Select Features using their Properties”. The second major way to deal with a high-dimensional data set is to project the data onto a lower dimension manifold – trying to maintain as many properties of the full-sized data set as possible. This is typically achieved using methods like principal component analysis and random projections. Yann LeCun, of convolutional neural network fame, has a paper in this update written with Raia Hadsell and Sumit Chopra that introduces a new method called Dimensionality Reduction by Learning an Invariant Mapping (DrLIM) that seems promising.

The second set of papers in this update deal with Ensembling techniques. It is increasingly apparent that the best practical approach to large, messy domains like the stock market is to combine the predictions of many heterogeneous individual prediction models in one ‘meta-model’. To prove the point, ensembling techniques have won the Netflix Prize and nearly every other machine learning competition that we are aware of in recent memory. Though this is an active field of development, there are a few heuristics emerging to help guide us. For one example, that unanimity seems to trump majority voting in our domain, see “Combining Heterogeneous Classifiers for Stock Selection” by Albanis and Batchelor.

Read past the break for citations for a few of the most interesting papers, or continue to references for the entire set.

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In Part 3 of our Q42009 research update, we’ve uploaded 14 new citations to our reference database that are a little bit outside of our fund’s main focus.  The papers pertain to identifying regime shifts – both in the broad sense of dislocations in behavior of the entire market and a narrower focus on changing dynamics in market subsets.

As the academics in us struggle to ignore how close some of this research comes to the kind of technical analysis we are taught to distrust from the first day of Finance 101, we would be remiss to not mention exactly how we use this kind of research.  First, a quick review of Andrew Lo‘s “Foundations of Technical Analysis” in the August 2000 issue of The Journal of Finance will go a long way to assuage the reader’s fear of technical analysis.  Yes, the subject is given some ‘validation by association’ here by the distinction of the author and publication, but we also agree with the argument that price dynamics encode some of the same sort of human behavioral bias that is central to the mainstream academics who study Behavioral Economics.  Regardless, we would stress that Helix does not use this kind of research as prescriptive for our positions, but rather as a way to cluster market environments.  We are interested in partitioning the historical record into different regimes so that we may attempt to have our models build themselves against the environments they are most likely to encounter instead of just simply what has been the recent past.

As an example, consider Hynek Mlnarik, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, and Rahul Savani’s February 2009 paper, “Multi-strategy trading utilizing market regimes”.  This paper illustrates this idea that different models and parameterizations can be appropriate for different market regimes and the modeller who exploits this information can improve their investment process.

Read past the break for citations for a few of the most interesting papers, or continue to references for the entire set.

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We’ve had the chance to update the magazine section of the site with a few more categories.  In addition to the original collection of Machine Learning content, you can now find pages for Quantitative Finance, General Finance, General Economics, and General Math.

Visit the Magazine section to check it out!

Internet news services and bloggers are a great way to gather news about finance and machine learning, but until now the Helix team’s content feed has been locked up in our personal RSS readers.

Now, thanks to the ongoing innovation of our favorite feed aggregator, Feedly, we can push some of that information to our website.  The development team at Feedly just launched a concept that allows users to embed feed content into curated ‘magazines’ on their own web pages.  Thanks to this work, we’ve introduced a Magazine section to our website that pulls information from our feeds marked as related to Finance and Machine Learning.

We’re excited to share more information with our website users and will be expanding this section of the website soon.  New ‘magazines’ will bring more information from our feeds on other topics like Quantitative Finance, General Finance, Economics, and Math.

For Part 2 of our Q42009 research update, we’d like to talk about some new and interesting papers in factor research. Along with this post, you can find 18 new citations in our reference database.

Factor research papers present data items that have some sort of explanatory power of future stock returns in one of two ways: either by describing a novel piece of information or by combining or decomposing factors already familiar to the industry. That both approaches can be equally valuable highlights some of the difficulty inherent in this type of research. Not only is the search space over possible factors basically infinite, but we can not just be content to try to find novel data items because the non-linear and conditionally dependent relationships between data and returns makes combining and decomposing known factors an equally compelling research avenue. With this in mind, it is essential that any factor research thoughtfully discuss the robustness of its approach and the possibility that any abnormal relationship is simply a spurious result.

In this update, we would like to highlight two novel factor approaches. In the first, Umut Gocken uses price and volume data to construct a proxy for information revelation to show negative abnormal returns to low information environments. The second paper, by Ioannis V. Floros and Travis R. A. Sapp, discusses the abnormal returns to shell companies involved in reverse mergers.

We also highlight three papers that revisit factors well-known to the investment community. Xuemin (Sterling) Yan and Zhe Zang decompose institutional ownership in a stock to examine only those holdings of short-term institutions, which are thought to be better informed. They find confirming evidence that the positive relationship between institutional ownership and stock returns is actually driven by the holdings of these short-term institutions. In other work, Tim Loughran and Jay W. Wellman improve on the classic measure of value, the book-to-market ratio, by presenting an enterprise multiple that shows better cross-sectional explanatory power, especially in large market cap stocks. Finally, Zhipeng Yan and Yan Zhao compose post earnings announcement drift with the value anomaly to great success.

Read past the break for citations for a few of the most interesting papers, or continue to references for the entire set.

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Over the next few weeks, we’d like to discuss some of the interesting papers we’ve come across since our last update to the reference database.  For this post, we’ve added citations to the database for 28 new papers on classification techniques.

One of the themes in this selection of papers is multilayered classifier architecture, where an algorithm is really the results of cascading modules.  A particularly compelling example is described in Pradip Ghanty’s contribution to the 10th volume of the Journal of Machine Learning.  The paper proposes the NEUROSVM architecture, which glues together a MLP neural net for feature extraction and a SVM for classification.  In the process, the algorithm significantly reduces the impact of the choice of kernel on the SVM performance.  While Helix has been using neural nets, SVMs, and even hybrid structures of the two for a while, this installment of citations includes our first introduction to the closely related work of Yann LeCun on convolutional networks.  His research represents a potential future avenue of investigation for our team.

Other highlights in this set of updates include a paper that introduces a Mahalanobis distance metric for k-nearest neighbor models (Weinberger 2009) and the presentation of a novel framework called Prototype Ranking in Yan and Ling, 2007.

Read past the break for citations for a few of the most interesting papers, or continue to references for the entire set.

Read more »

iStockAnalyst, an online community of financial bloggers and investment advisors, reported on Helix Partners on October 6.  Read the Article

HFMWeek, an online digest of hedge fund news, reported on the launch of Helix Partners in their September 14 Daily Snapshot feature.  Read the Article

Insto, an Australian capital markets news service, covered Helix’s launch in a post on Saturday.  Read the Article

Helix was also covered by the European Banking News Network.  Read the Article