Irene Aldridge

Recent arguments accuse high-frequency traders (HFTs) of a specific market distortion scheme. The HFTs, the argument goes, use their soon-to-be-cancelled limit orders to mislead large investors about the shape of the supply and demand curve. This HFT strategy is purported to work as follows: 1) an HFT posts lots of...

Many articles on the subject of money talk about different ways to invest the money: which stocks to pick, whether to choose bonds over stocks and Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) versus mutual funds. Few of the pieces, however, address the key issue underlying any allocation which may be keeping investors up...

Several decades back, managing investment risk was straightforward by today's standards. A simple strategy of "don't put all your eggs into the same basket" worked well: invest into many stocks with different businesses, the thinking went, and reap the rewards of positive returns in all market conditions. The key underlying...

Present economic conditions leave much to be desired: Europe is trying to resolve its debt problems, and the U.S. has seen much better times in terms of employment rates and consumer confidence. Against this backdrop of economic calamities, the financial markets are experiencing high volatility, seesawing up and down, gaining...

The latest turmoil observed in the European and U.S. markets may be symptomatic of a broader problem: changing behavior in financial securities. Historically, prices of unrelated securities used to rise and fall independently of each other and without great influence from the broader markets. Recent studies show that when markets...

Many high-profile long-term investors have publicly expressed their frustration with the tactics of some high frequency traders (HFTs). While much of the criticism leveled against high-frequency traders does not hold water (research has shown that HFTs drive down transaction costs incurred by all investors, for example), certain tactics should give...

The U.S. Treasury bonds and bills (T-bonds and T-bills) have long been the beacon of security for many investors, young and old. With AAA-marked bonds, employees have invested in T-bonds in preparation for guaranteed retirement; parents have bought T-bonds to secure funds for their children's education; managers of countless mutual...

For many investors "Sell in May and Go Away" was the mantra to relax for the summer with trading history defending this as the best way to protect your portfolio. While the exact origin of the expression is unknown, it was most likely developed during the stock market boom of...

Last week, prices of several commodities declined abruptly: silver lost over a quarter of its value from April 29 to May 5, while oil plunged nearly 10% over the same period of time. The immediate question on the minds of many investors was whether the commodity run was over. And...

April is full of economic activity: finally we're out of the winter doldrums and it's just before many people follow the old adage to "sell in May and go away." April's macro announcements significantly drive prices of the U.S. equities. This article examines market-wide events that have the highest likelihood...

Over the past three years, much of the online and cocktail party chatter has buzzed around the when to expect inflation. Everyone has long agreed that high inflation is inevitable, gold ETFs have been snapped up and prices driven to the sky by hedgers, yet month after month the level...

On Thursday, February 17, 2011, the U.S. Bureau of Labor released the latest inflation figures. Inflation, measured as a change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), registered a slight decline at 0.4% this past month (as compared to 0.5% realized in the previous month), and just 0.2% when...

Adapted from The Quant Investor's Almanac 2011: A Roadmap for Investing (Wiley) by Irene Aldridge and Steven Krawciw

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have garnered quite a bit of attention lately. Some have fingered ETFs as the cause of the May 6, 2010 crash of the U.S. equity markets; others...

About the time of the "flash crash" of May 6, 2010, many small investors appear to have left the U.S. stock markets, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. The Financial Reform Bill, passed and celebrated with much fanfare last week, is sometimes thought to help bring those...

High frequency trading has been taking Wall Street by storm.  While no institution thoroughly tracks performance of high-frequency funds as of the date this article is written, colloquial evidence suggests that the majority of high-frequency managers delivered positive returns through the most recent financial crises.

The discourse on what is...

High-frequency trading (HFT) uses quantitative investment computer programs to hold short-term positions in equities, options, futures, ETFs, currencies, and all other financial instruments that possess electronic trading capability. (Some securities, like Credit Default Swaps, for example, cannot be traded electronically, and are incompatible with investment algorithms.)

Aiming to capture...