Blog Posts

We look at the current level of participation by individual, or “retail,” traders and investors in the United States stock market.  We look at historical trends of retail investor involvement, current estimates of their market share, the impact of online trading platforms, and considers the activity of retail investors across major stock exchanges.  We’ll also […]

A variety of reinforcement learning algorithms have been explored for trading applications. Here, we look at key RL algorithms and how they apply to markets ranging from stocks and currencies to commodities and bonds.   Key Takeaways – Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Trading RL algorithms help trading agents learn strategies that maximize returns by interacting […]

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning where an agent learns to make decisions by interacting with an environment through trial and error, receiving feedback in the form of rewards. In a trading context, the environment is the financial market, the agent’s actions might be buying, selling, or holding assets, and the reward […]

Trading the financial markets is a complex undertaking that involves managing a variety of trade-offs. These trade-offs are not merely binary choices but often exist on a spectrum between two or more interests or wants and across a variety of dimensions. Accordingly, traders have to balance competing interests, resources, and strategies. Understanding these trade-offs is […]

Imagine standing in a casino with rows of slot machines, each promising different payouts. Your goal?  Maximize your winnings without knowing which machine is “hot.”  This captures the essence of Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems – a framework for balancing exploration (testing uncertain options) and exploitation (leveraging known winners).  In trading, MAB methods are a capital […]

Trading well requires both innovation and discipline.  Markets always evolve in various ways (i.e., new types of buyers and sellers, new motivations, new strategies, new technology, new changes in the world), forcing traders to choose between adapting and going full steam ahead on what works.  Exploration allows traders to discover new opportunities, while exploitation helps […]

Private credit refers to any debt arrangement that takes place outside of traditional public lending institutions such as banks. This includes direct lending, distressed debt, mezzanine debt, and other types of specialized lending. In this article, we look at the concept and various aspects related to private credit.   Key Takeaways – Private Credit Private […]

Options, in general, give you the right, but not the obligation, to buy (call option) or sell (put option) an underlying asset (like a stock, ETF, or index) at a predetermined price (the strike price) before a specific expiration date.  This “right” comes at a cost, called the premium. Where LEAPS and short-term options diverge […]

Psychology is a big component of trading. The decisions we make are a product of the processing of the information that our brain takes in. This means that our psychological biases can have a big impact on our trading decisions. There are many different psychological biases that can affect traders, but some of the more […]

Perpetual futures have changed derivatives trading by offering a futures-like contract without an expiration date.  Originally popularized in crypto markets, they provide traders with continuous exposure to price movements while using a funding rate mechanism to maintain price alignment with the underlying asset.  With their growing adoption, perpetual futures are changing how traders hedge risk and […]