Cross-country equity futures strategies

August 17, 2024

Jupyter Notebook

Developing macro strategies for cross-country equity futures trading is challenging due to the diverse and dynamic nature of equity indices and the global integration of corporations. This complexity makes it difficult to align futures prices with country-specific economic factors. Therefore, success in cross-country macro trading often relies on differentiating indicators related to monetary policy and corporate earnings growth in local currency. Additionally, cross-country strategies benefit from a broad and diverse set of countries to generate value consistently.
We tested five simple, thematic, and potentially differentiating macro scores across a panel of 16 developed and emerging markets. Our findings suggest that a straightforward, non-optimized composite score could have added significant value beyond a risk-parity exposure to global equity index futures. Furthermore, a purely relative value equity index futures strategy would have produced respectable long-term returns, complementing passive equity exposure.

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Macro-quantamental scorecards: A Python kit for fixed-income markets

August 3, 2024

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Macro-quantamental scorecards are condensed visualizations of point-in-time economic information for a specific financial market. Their defining characteristic is the combination of efficient presentation and evidence of empirical power. This post and the accompanying Python code show how to build scorecards for duration exposure based on six thematic scores: excess inflation, excess economic growth, overconfidence, labour market tightening, financial conditions, and government finance. All thematic scores have displayed predictive power for interest rate swap returns in the U.S. and the euro area over the past 25 years. Since economic change is often gradual and requires attention to a broad range of indicators, monitoring can be tedious and costly. The influence of such change can, therefore, build surreptitiously. Macro-quantamental scorecards cut information costs and attention time and, hence, improve the information efficiency of the investment process.

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How to adjust regression-based trading signals for reliability

July 20, 2024

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Regression-based statistical learning is convenient for combining candidate trading factors into single signals (view post here). Models and signals are updated sequentially using expanding time windows of empirical evidence and offering a realistic basis for backtesting. However, simple regression-based predictions disregard statistical reliability, which tends to increase as time passes or decrease after structural breaks. This short methodological post proposes signals based on regression coefficients adjusted for statistical precision. The adjustment correctly aligns intertemporal risk-taking with the predictive power of signals. PnLs become less seasonal and outperform as sample size and statistical quality grow.

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Inventory scores and metal futures returns

May 4, 2024

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Inventory scores are quantamental (point-in-time) indicators of the inventory states and dynamics of economies or commodity sectors. Inventory scores plausibly predict base metal futures returns due to two effects. First, they influence the convenience yield of a metal and the discount at which futures are trading relative to physical stock. Second, they predict demand changes for restocking by producers and industrial consumers. Inventory scores are available for finished manufacturing goods and base metals themselves. An empirical analysis for 2000-2024 shows the strong predictive power of finished goods inventory scores and some modest additional predictive power of commodity-specific inventory scores.

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Macro trends and equity allocation: a brief introduction

April 4, 2024

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Macroeconomic trends affect stocks differently, depending on their lines of business and their home markets. Hence, point-in-time macro trend indicators can support two types of investment decisions: allocation across sectors within the same country and allocation across countries within the same sector. Panel analysis for 11 sectors and 12 countries over the last 25 years reveals examples for both. Across sectors, export growth, services business sentiment, and consumer confidence have predicted the outperformance of energy stocks, services stocks, and real estate stocks, respectively. Across countries, relative export growth, manufacturing sentiment changes, and financial conditions have predicted the outperformance of local stocks versus foreign ones for the overall market and within sectors.

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Equity market timing: the value of consumption data

January 27, 2024

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The dividend discount model suggests that stock prices are negatively related to expected real interest rates and positively to earnings growth. The economic position of households or consumers influences both. Consumer strength spurs demand and exerts price pressure, thus pushing up real policy rate expectations. Meanwhile, tight labor markets and high wage growth shift national income from capital to labor.
This post calculates a point-in-time score of consumer strength for 16 countries over almost three decades based on excess private consumption growth, import trends, wage growth, unemployment rates, and employment gains. This consumer strength score and most of its constituents displayed highly significant negative predictive power with regard to equity index returns. Value generation in a simple equity timing model has been material, albeit concentrated on business cycles’ early and late stages.

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Sovereign debt sustainability and CDS returns

November 4, 2023

Selling protection through credit default swaps is akin to writing put options on sovereign default. Together with tenuous market liquidity, this explains the negative skew and heavy fat tails of generic CDS (short protection or long credit) returns. Since default risk depends critically on sovereign debt dynamics, point-in-time metrics of general government debt sustainability for given market conditions are plausible trading indicators for sovereign CDS markets and do justice to the non-linearity of returns. There is strong evidence of a negative relation between increases in predicted debt ratios and concurrent returns. There is also evidence of a negative predictive relation between debt ratio changes and subsequent CDS returns. Trading these seems to produce modest but consistent alpha.

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Macro demand-based rates strategies

October 21, 2023

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The pace of aggregate demand in the macroeconomy exerts pressure on interest rates. In credible inflation targeting regimes, excess demand should be negatively related to duration returns and positively to curve-flattening returns. Indeed, point-in-time market information states of various macro demand-related indicators all have helped predict returns of directional and curve positions in interest rate swaps across developed and emerging markets. The predictive power of an equally weighted composite demand score has been highly significant at a monthly or quarterly frequency and the economic value of related strategies has been sizeable.

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Equity versus fixed income: the predictive power of bank surveys

September 9, 2023

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Bank lending surveys help predict the relative performance of equity and duration positions. Signals of strengthening credit demand and easing lending conditions favor a stronger economy and expanding leverage, benefiting equity positions. Signs of deteriorating credit demand and tightening credit supply bode for a weaker economy and more accommodative monetary policy, benefiting long-duration positions. Empirical evidence for developed markets strongly supports these propositions. Since 2000, bank survey scores have been a significant predictor of equity versus duration returns. They helped create uncorrelated returns in both asset classes, as well as for a relative asset class book.

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Business sentiment and commodity future returns

August 25, 2023

Business sentiment is a key driver of inventory dynamics in global industry and, therefore, a powerful indicator of aggregate demand for industrial commodities. Changes in manufacturing business confidence can be aggregated by industry size across all major economies to give a powerful directional signal of global demand for metals and energy. An empirical analysis based on information states of sentiment changes and subsequent commodity futures returns shows a clear and highly significant predictive relation. Various versions of trading signals based on short-term survey changes all produce significant long-term alpha. The predictive relation and value generation apply to all liquid commodity futures contracts.

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asset management Asset Purchase Program banks bond returns bond yields bubbles capital regulation central counterparty clearing China collateral commodities credit returns default ECB economic data EM equity returns euro area crisis Fed financial crisis FX FX interventions FX returns government debt government deficits herding inflation information insurances Japan leverage liquidity machine learning market turmoil price factors regulation risk management shadow banking statistical methods term structure trend following variance risk premium VIX volatility ZLB
ABOUT US

Macrosynergy is a London based macroeconomic research and technology company whose founders have developed and employed macro quantamental investment strategies in liquid, tradable asset classes, across many markets and for a variety of different factors to generate competitive, uncorrelated investment returns for institutional investors for over eighteen years. Our quantitative-fundamental (quantamental) computing system tracks a broad range of real-time macroeconomic trends in developed and emerging countries, transforming them into macro systematic quantamental investment strategies. In June 2020 Macrosynergy and J.P. Morgan started a collaboration to scale the quantamental system and to popularize tradable economics across financial markets.

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