Blog Posts

Interest rates alone don’t explain why a 10-year Treasury pays more than a 3-month bill. Interest rates are essentially the foundation of financial markets.  But the slope of the yield curve holds deeper information about risk, behavior, and expected compensation. Every Treasury yield has two components:  where short-term rates are expected to go, and  what […]

A hedge fund is a type of investment vehicle that pools together money from a group of investors and uses that money to speculate on a variety of assets, such as stocks, bonds, commodities, and derivatives. Hedge funds are typically structured as limited partnerships or limited liability companies, and are largely unregulated compared to traditional […]

Currency markets today are now shaped not just by interest rates and macro data, but by algorithms that learn, adapt, and react faster than any human can. What was once experimental is now routine, embedded in the architecture of both institutional trading desks and central bank research units. In the past, AI and automation merely […]

When evaluating an income-producing investment like a bond fund, ETF, or mutual fund, you’ll often encounter three common yield metrics.  At first glance, they might look similar, but each tells a different story about the income potential and performance of the fund.  Let’s break down the 30-Day SEC Yield, Distribution Yield, and 12-Month Yield – […]

A situation where the S&P 500 and USD are down simultaneously is rare and potentially profitable if you know how to trade it.  This environment upends the usual risk-off playbook (long USD, long Treasuries, short risk), and that opens the door to some creative derivatives trades that capitalize on correlation shifts, macro shifts, and mispriced […]

All the methods discussed in our original article on reinforcement learning (value-based methods, policy-based methods, and model-based methods) are model-free: they directly learn from interaction with the environment without trying to understand how the environment works internally. In contrast, model-based RL involves the agent building or using a model of the environment’s dynamics. In trading, […]

The entire purpose of trading and investing is to earn more money back over time than is lost. At worst, it should preserve your purchasing power over time. Drawdowns are the one thing that should be avoided at all costs. Warren Buffett is known for his quotes on investing, one of which pertains to his […]

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 […]

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 […]