Creating Long Short Portfolios in Equities Lab Shorting stocks is hard to do profitably. Very hard. That said, adding a short component to portfolios can reduce drawdown. Long/Short portfolios are also useful to see if factors are important for good investment performance. Using the islongshort macro To model a long/short portfolio with maximum control, use the islongshort macro.…
This how-to shows how to create a strategy in Equities Lab, and how to do some basic analysis of it. For humor value, we take the point of view of a children’s book character, named Amelia Bedelia, who has no common sense. We have all felt this way sometimes. Create A Screener A quantitative mutual fund is a screener. …
Henry Crutcher How to analyze a factor without ranking in Equities Lab Create a screen Everything starts with creating a screen. So, onward! Name your screen Screeners with names can be found later. If you want to put your screens into categories, simply put MyCoolCategory: at the front. Limit your stocks You can type “Market Cap > 500m” here. …
Should you be Scared of the Dow’s 1700 point drop? On the fifth of February 2018 the Dow Jones Industrial Average saw its largest single day drop in history. This drop coming off a market sell-off at the end of January has caused many investors to call for the start of a bear market.…
Sometimes it’s better to not reinvent the wheel. A number of our existing professors have allowed a few of their class homework assignments to be publicly available to other professors. You can import these assignments into your Equities Lab class environment and either use them as-is or change them to follow your syllabus.…
So you’ve just downloaded Equities Lab and are ready to set up your account for the class you’re teaching next semester. To successfully do this, just follow the below steps: 1. Navigate to Account Settings 2. Click on “Create Course” 3. Name your course following the rules 4. Click on “Create new homework” 5.…
Now, this flag looks incredibly simple, but whenever you see orange text in Equities Lab, it means that there is a deeper formula to explore. Clicking on that formula we are presented with the following – Though the flag itself is simple, the underlying formula is not. Understanding and analyzing cash flow statements takes time.…
If you have been using the Equities Lab system in recent weeks, you may have seen a new error that hadn’t appeared before. ——————————— Stock Server Error:Server Error:Cannot compare split ajusted quantities to constants: greater(Close, 444) Don’t worry! This error message doesn’t mean that the system is down; it simply tells you that there is a split adjusted value in a place it shouldn’t be.…
If you’re a short seller, then I’d like to introduce you to the Ohlson O-Score. This is a score created by Dr. James Ohlson of New York University, aimed at predicting the financial distress of a company. The Ohlson O-Score is the result of a nine-factor linear combination of coefficient-weighted accounting ratios that are found from financial disclosure statements that are provided by publicly traded companies.…
I’ve been seeing a lot of articles recently that are very focused on the idea, that by purchasing the industry or sector that performed best over the past year you are giving you the best chance at making returns. I’m a little skeptical, but just as hopeful to see whether or not this is a potential new avenue to take in my portfolio.…
When investing, for every fairy tale stock like an Amazon(AMZN) or Nvidia(NVDA), there’s an equally disastrous stock like MoSys(MOSY) or Gevo (GEVO). To avoid getting into stocks like these, it’s important to look at their failures and analyze them to avoid getting into the next potential train wreck of a stock. …
Most anytime we analyze a company or build a screen; we use a number of scores that are pre-built in the Equities Lab system. These scores are tried and tested, but they lack that personal touch. I think it’s time we learned how to build our own scores within the software.…
Monte Carlo Simulation As investors, we all know that each investment we make comes with a certain amount of risk. We can decrease this risk by understanding all possible outcomes. Better yet, we can visualize each outcome through the use of a Monte Carlo Simulation. In a broad stroke definition – a Monte Carlo simulation allows for people to make informed quantitative decisions based on a range of possible outcomes.…
In my years of using Equities Lab as a quantitative investment tool, I have never lost sight of the core values of long term investing. Many of these values are in the teachings of Benjamin Graham and used by an idol of mine, Warren Buffett. Remembering this, no matter how much risk I take on in my portfolio, I always keep a subsection for value investments.…
I’m not a big technical trader. That being said, a lot of people in the information age are, and because of that we have been sure to include a number of technical indicators within the Equities Lab system. One such indicator, the relative strength index(RSI), is extremely common among technical analysts, and I think it is time to put the RSI indicator to the test.…
In the past two years of using Equities Lab, I have never stopped experimenting. However, at some point along the way, after taking up a prop trading course I found a few indicators that I trust and use more than others—essentially using those variables whenever I need to analyze a strategy.…
Debt, a word that consumers and college students know all too well. How do companies view debt, and how does it affect their stock price? Let’s find out by taking a look at both high-debt and low-debt companies. High Debt This screener finds companies with a debt to equity ratio ranking them in the top 25% of the market, total liabilities to assets ranking in the top 25% of the market while outperforming by 2%.…
Most businesses run on a cyclical manner, meaning that they are subject to a normal business cycle. Using the Equities Lab screening technology, we can take a look at companies that lost 50% of their workforce in the last 252 days of trading. While we look at these companies, it is important that we keep in mind that there is a bigger picture for layoffs and losing employees rather than just “cost cutting”.…
When it comes to investing, I love thinking in terms of standard deviation. It’s one of the quickest ways to assess the risk of a potential investment, and there is an established good benchmark standard deviation that I shoot for when picking investment strategies. There is just one small problem – the close.…