I recently did a thematic analysis of a reading list on investment alpha, which involves:
1. Excess return.
2. Active management.
3. Adjusted risk.
The following themes emerged from the reading list, and from also checking the rankings of several hundred books at Amazon.com:
1. Excess return: fund type (hedge fund, private equity, venture capital); return drivers (including asset class); and quantitative models.
2. Active management: discretionary (human trading, portfolio composition and rebalancing, options, technical analysis) and algorithmic (algorithmic trading; complex event / stream processing; computational intelligence; genetic algorithms; machine learning; neural nets; and software agents).
3. Adjusted risk: Bayesian probabilities; investor psychology; market microstructure; and risk management models (such as Monte Carlo simulation, Value at Risk, and systematic risk)
This core work suggests the following query line:
SELECT return drivers (Bayesian belief network) (multi-asset) (portfolio) (fund)
WHERE risk (Bayesian probability) (exposures) (exposures – investor decisions) (exposures – market microstructure) AND trade (algorithms)
ORDER BY Bayesian (belief network, probability); return drivers (multi-asset); risk (exposures); and trading (algorithms).
This thematic analysis will help to focus my post-PhD research on the sociology of finance into the following initial research questions:
1. What is the spectrum of possible return drivers in a multi-asset world?
A good model for this is David Swensen’s Yale endowment portfolio detailed in Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment (New York: The Free Press, 2009). Antti Ilmanen’s magisterial Expected Returns: An Investor’s Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011) has information on the return drivers of specific asset classes. Matthew Hudson’s recent Funds: Private Equity, Hedge Funds, and All Core Structures (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2014) deals with global fund structures.
2. What specific risk exposures might these multi-assets face, and under what conditions?
Richard C. Grinold and Ronald Kahn’s Active Portfolio Management: A Quantitative Approach for Producing Superior Returns and Controlling Risk (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999) is the classic book on institutional portfolio models. Morton Glantz and Robert Kissell’s Multi-Asset Risk Modeling: Techniques for a Global Economy in an Electronic and Algorithmic Trading Era (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2014) is a recent book I will look at. Charles Albert-Lehalle and Sophie Larulle’s Market Microstructure in Practice (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2014), and Thierry Foucault, Marco Pagano, and Ailsa Roell’s Market Liquidity: Theory, Evidence, and Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) deal respectively with the practice and theory of contemporary financial markets. There are many books on behavioural finance and investor psychology: two recent ones are H. Kent Baker and Victor Ricciardi’s collection Investor Behavior: The Psychology of Financial Planning and Investing (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), and Tim Richards’ Investing Psychology: The Effects of Behavioral Finance on Investment Choice and Bias (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2014).
3. How can algorithmic trading and computational techniques model the risk-return dynamics of alpha generation?
Despite its flaws Rishi K. Narang’s Inside the Black Box: A Simple Guide to Quantitative and High Frequency Trading (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013) opened my eyes to the structures needed for alpha generation. The Bayesian approach is detailed in David Barber’s Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Barry Johnson’s Algorithmic Trading and DMA: An Introduction to Direct Access Trading Strategies (London: 4Myeloma Press, 2010) and Robert Kissell’s The Science of Algorithmic Trading and Portfolio Management (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2013) deal with order types in algorithmic trading. Christian Dunis, Spiros Likothanassis, Andreas Karathanasopoulos, Georgios Sermpinis, and Konstantinos Theofilatos have edited a recent collection on Computational Intelligence Techniques for Trading and Investment (New York: Routledge, 2014). Eugene A. Durenard’s Professional Automated Trading: Theory and Practice (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013) covers software agents. For retail trader-oriented applications of data mining, machine learning, and Monte Carlo simulations there is Kevin Davey’s Building Algorithmic Trading Systems: A Trader’s Journey from Data Mining to Monte Carlo Simulation to Live Trading (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), and David Aronson and Timothy Masters’ Statistically Sound Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading of Financial Instruments: Developing Predictive-Model-Based Trading Systems Using TSSB (CreateSpace, 2013).
What this means is that for an investment of about $US1,000 a new researcher can gain some of the core books on institutional, quantitative portfolio and risk management; behavioural finance and market microstructure as potential sources for edges; and some recent practitioner-oriented literature on algorithmic / automated trading that uses computational intelligence.
In deference to Mao and McKenzie Wark’s vectoralist class:
Let a thousand algorithmic / quantitative micro-funds bloom.