Is Your Trading Strategy Still Working?

The Challenge of Validating Strategy Performance

One of the challenges faced by investment strategists is to assess whether a strategy is continuing to perform as it should.  This applies whether it is a new strategy that has been backtested and is now being traded in production, or a strategy that has been live for a while.
All strategies have a limited lifespan.  Markets change, and a trading strategy that can’t accommodate that change will get out of sync with the market and start to lose money. Unless you have a way to identify when a strategy is no longer in sync with the market, months of profitable trading can be undone very quickly.

The issue is particularly important for quantitative strategies.  Firstly, quantitative strategies are susceptible to the risk of over-fitting.  Secondly, unlike a strategy based on fundamental factors, it may be difficult for the analyst to verify that the drivers of strategy profitability remain intact.

Savvy investors are well aware of the risk of quantitative strategies breaking down and are likely to require reassurance that a period of underperformance is a purely temporary phenomenon.

It might be tempting to believe that you will simply stop trading when the strategy stops working.  But given the stochastic nature of investment returns, how do you distinguish a losing streak from a system breakdown?

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Stochastic Process Control

One approach to the problem derives from the field of Monte Carlo simulation and stochastic process control.  Here we random draw samples from the distribution of strategy returns and use these to construct a prediction envelope to forecast the range of future returns.  If the equity curve of the strategy over the forecast period  falls outside of the envelope, it would raise serious concerns that the strategy may have broken down.  In those circumstances you would almost certainly want to trade the strategy in smaller size for a while to see if it recovers, or even exit the strategy altogether it it does not.

I will illustrate the procedure for the long/short ETF strategy that I described in an earlier post, making use of Michael Bryant’s excellent Market System Analyzer software.

To briefly refresh, the strategy is built using cointegration theory to construct long/short portfolios is a selection of ETFs that provide exposure to US and international equity, currency, real estate and fixed income markets.  The out of sample back-test performance of the strategy is very encouraging:

Fig 2

 

Fig 1

There was evidently a significant slowdown during 2014, with a reduction in the risk-adjusted returns and win rate for the strategy:

Fig 1

This period might itself have raised questions about the continuing effectiveness of the strategy.  However, we have the benefit of hindsight in seeing that, during the first two months of 2015, performance appeared to be recovering.

Consequently we put the strategy into production testing at the beginning of March 2015 and we now wish to evaluate whether the strategy is continuing on track.   The results indicate that strategy performance has been somewhat weaker than we might have hoped, although this is compensated for by a significant reduction in strategy volatility, so that the net risk-adjusted returns remain somewhat in line with recent back-test history.

Fig 3

Using the MSA software we sample the most recent back-test returns for the period to the end of Feb 2015, and create a 95% prediction envelope for the returns since the beginning of March, as follows:

Fig 2

As we surmised, during the production period the strategy has slightly underperformed the projected median of the forecast range, but overall the equity curve still falls within the prediction envelope.  As this stage we would tentatively conclude that the strategy is continuing to perform within expected tolerance.

Had we seen a pattern like the one shown in the chart below, our conclusion would have been very different.

Fig 4

As shown in the illustration, the equity curve lies below the lower boundary of the prediction envelope, suggesting that the strategy has failed. In statistical terms, the trades in the validation segment appear not to belong to the same statistical distribution of trades that preceded the validation segment.

This strategy failure can also be explained as follows: The equity curve prior to the validation segment displays relatively little volatility. The drawdowns are modest, and the equity curve follows a fairly straight trajectory. As a result, the prediction envelope is fairly narrow, and the drawdown at the start of the validation segment is so large that the equity curve is unable to rise back above the lower boundary of the envelope. If the history prior to the validation period had been more volatile, it’s possible that the envelope would have been large enough to encompass the equity curve in the validation period.

 CONCLUSION

Systematic trading has the advantage of reducing emotion from trading because the trading system tells you when to buy or sell, eliminating the difficult decision of when to “pull the trigger.” However, when a trading system starts to fail a conflict arises between the need to follow the system without question and the need to stop following the system when it’s no longer working.

Stochastic process control provides a technical, objective method to determine when a trading strategy is no longer working and should be modified or taken offline. The prediction envelope method extrapolates the past trade history using Monte Carlo analysis and compares the actual equity curve to the range of probable equity curves based on the extrapolation.

Next we will look at nonparametric distributions tests  as an alternative method for assessing strategy performance.