Curated items for this scope are still being collected. Below are the latest related updates; items meeting the curation criteria will be marked separately.
In the 10th installment of his 2026 portfolio optimization series, Rob Carver conducts rolling out-of-sample backtests to compare four return pooling schemes. The test sample consists of 50 instruments randomly selected from 214 available instruments, with in-sample lengths of 5, 10, and 20 years and out-of-sample lengths of 1 and 5 years. The optimization uses shrinkage methods with an SR shrinkage of 0.5 and a correlation shrinkage of 0.75, while also incorporating the reverse rule of each trading rule, with only positive SR rules retained for optimization.
This article is the eighth installment in the Portfolio Optimization Series. The author proposes using the Euclidean distance of SR vectors across multiple trading rules for each instrument to determine whether to combine cross-instrument returns, calibrates 95% critical values for different historical lengths using random data, and then obtains pseudo-instruments through hierarchical merging. The author compares three approaches—full merging, algorithmic merging, and no merging—using in-sample backtests across 214 futures instruments. The results show inconsistent out-of-sample performance, with longer sample data favoring no merging. The author ultimately concludes that the algorithm is highly complex and the grouping results lack intuitive logic, so it will not be adopted for now, and future research will explore simpler merging rules.
This article introduces a method for automatically identifying structural breakpoints in the Sharpe ratio of trading rules, using independent t-tests to compare mean differences across subsamples, recursively splitting the sample while requiring each subsample to retain at least 5 years of data. The authors provide complete Python implementation code, using the momentum4 rule for CORN futures as an example, with the algorithm automatically identifying August 26, 1982 as the breakpoint.
The author examines the effect of equal-weighted averaging of portfolio weights generated by different shrinkage methods in the Portfolio Optimization Series, comparing 9 shrinkage parameter combinations with 6 weight averaging combinations, totaling 15 approaches. The backtests use randomly selected 9 trading rules and random instruments, with 1-, 5-, and 10-year in-sample periods and 1- and 5-year out-of-sample periods, each group containing 4,000 random portfolios.
This article is the sixth part of a series on statistical arbitrage for independent traders. It explains the three core modules of triangulated statistical arbitrage and their resource allocation priorities. High-quality pair screening is the core foundation: using 24 months of historical data, the top 10% of pairs are screened monthly and divided into 5 quality tiers, with the best tier achieving a Sharpe ratio of 1.6 and the worst only 0.42. The author discloses only the general methodology and does not reveal specific implementation details.
