Sources of Trend-following Profitability
May 9, 2017 - Technical Trading
What makes trend-following tick? In the April 2017 version of his paper entitled “What Drives Trend-Following Profits?”, Adrian Zoicas-Ienciu investigates sources of trend-following profits in equity indexes and stocks. He focuses on daily trading signals for Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closing levels, as follows:
- Each day after the close, he compares the DJIA close to its simple moving average (SMA) plus or minus a buffer to suppress signal noise. If the close is above (below) the SMA plus (minus) the buffer, the signal is buy (sell). Otherwise the signal is neutral. He considers SMAs ranging from 2 to 250 trading days and signal buffers ranging from 1% to 5% for total of 1,245 rules.
- He implements signal changes at the next daily close by taking a 100% position in DJIA after a neutral signal, a (100%+x) position after a buy signal and a (100%-y) position after a sell signal. This approach allows separation of trend-following versus allocation effects. He assumes rebalancing friction 0.5% of traded value, cost of leverage (x) as the risk-free rate and return on cash (y) as the risk-free rate.
- He assesses rule performance principally as excess daily return versus buy-and-hold (B&H). He considers as alternative benchmarks the risk-free rate or a combination benchmark that is each day: B&H for a neutral signal; B&H for a buy signal; and, (100%-y) times B&H plus y times the risk-free rate for a sell signal.
- He assesses overall trend-following performance as the average performance of the 1,245 rules. He also considers the performance of an equally weighted portfolio of the top tenth (decile) of rules in each of 64 sequential 370-day subperiods.
He also evaluates the role of signal volatility (volume-weighted trading frequency) as a determinant of profitability. Using daily DJIA closing prices and 1-month U.S. Treasury bill (T-bill) yields as the risk-free rate during March 1926 through early October 2016, he finds that: Keep Reading