Research
A continuously updated feed of research papers that pass our automated relevance screening for systematic trading — plus every paper we have published a review of, whatever it scored. Particular focus on alpha hypotheses that can be formalised and tested. The Radar also covers portfolio construction, market risk and execution where the research is directly relevant to systematic investment processes. Follow new entries by RSS.
15,697 papers screened · 250 on the radar · 27 shown
Frequent market instability and the lack of rigorously validated forecasting frameworks pose significant challenges for predicting market stress in the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE).
PAPER REPORTS · Random Forest crash-gated risk-off strategy, pooled equal-weighted, 2019-2022 test period: total return 67.26% (15.01%… · Annualized volatility 16.39% (strategy) vs. 18.11% (buy-and-hold); maximum drawdown -32.21% vs.
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe 0.47 · Return +25.2% · Max DD -21.6%
Artificial intelligence (AI) now supports investment workflows from data and prediction through research, portfolios, execution, and tool use. Technical capability, however, is not evidence of investment profitability.
This study constructs a climate risk attention indicator for Chinese funds by applying Word2Vec-based text analysis to annual fund reports.
PAPER REPORTS · Carhart four-factor alpha regression coefficients (2013-2023, annual fund-year panel, fund and year fixed effects):… · Authors' summary claim: "an annualized alpha of approximately 2.7% associated with acute risk focus" (conclusion…
Let a finite population of n labelled examples carry a class-weighted loss, with pi*n in a rare positive class weighted by N0/N1. We study estimation of total risk from a subsample K << n under designs allocating K0 and K1 draws to the two strata.
This study investigates the forecasting performance of machine learning models and traditional econometric volatility models in predicting daily stock price volatility across selected Southern African Development Community (SADC) markets from 02 January 2015…
This study comparatively examined the forecasting performance of machine learning and traditional volatility models in predicting daily exchange rate volatility across selected economies from 01 January 2015 to 08 May 2026.
Foundation models promise accurate forecasts with little or no task-specific training, but whether they can replace models designed specifically for electricity price forecasting remains unclear.
PAPER REPORTS · Total BESS arbitrage profit over 2021-2025 (1,826 days, 1 MWh battery, 25 EUR round-trip operating cost deducted per… · Total profit Poland: unlimited-bid best 106,685 EUR (TabPFN-3) vs Oracle 123,439 EUR, 86.4% of perfect foresight; Spain…
Algorithmic trading now represents a market exceeding $20 billion, where even marginal gains in signal robustness can translate into economically significant returns.
PAPER REPORTS · Hybrid ensemble, OOS 2025 (252 trading days), 2.2bp per trade per leg: total return 51.26%, Sharpe 2.44, Sortino 5.35,… · Hybrid ensemble, OOS 2025: annualised CAPM alpha 0.423 (p = 0.011), beta 0.048, Probabilistic Sharpe Ratio 0.960
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe 0.75 · Return +696.5% · Max DD -365.1%
PAPER REPORTS · Out-of-sample RMSE (70-30 split, 2021–2024, no transaction costs): LLF BTC 0.541, ETH 0.256, USDT 0.244, BNB 0.676, BCH… · Out-of-sample MAE: LLF BTC 0.377, ETH 0.199, BNB 0.446, BCH 0.567, LTC 0.458, ICP 0.519, MATIC 0.612, USDT 0.137 (RF…
PAPER REPORTS · Optimized ESG portfolio: average conditional volatility 1.29% (2020) declining to 1.18% (2022) and 1.23% (2023-2024),… · Optimized ESG portfolio breach rates: 0.3526 volatility violations and 0.4261 drawdown violations on average 2020-2024…
Lead-lag relationships are widely used in financial time series, and many clustering algorithms based on them have been developed. The traditional DTW-KMedoids algorithm performs well both on the synthetic dataset and the real financial dataset.
PAPER REPORTS · Sharpe 0.866, annual return 6.21%, annual volatility 7.17%, max drawdown -63.908, hit rate 0.520, profit-loss ratio… · Sharpe 0.808 / 0.790 (KShape mod / med), lead strategy, 679 assets, same period; drawdowns -67.604 / -69.418
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe 0.39 · Return +27.5% · Max DD -39.3%
This paper develops the first end-to-end application of cross-sectional learning-to-rank to the S&P 500 weekly options (SPXW) zero-day-to-expiration surface, integrated with margin-aware position sizing, an abstention rule driven by model uncertainty, and a…
PAPER REPORTS · Out-of-time 2025 annualized Sharpe 4.308 to 5.761 across seven sizing methods, net of Reg-T margin, tiered IBKR fees,… · Headline Edge Allocation OOT 2025: Sharpe 5.7612, Sortino 7.0291, annualized return 10.48% (excess of risk-free),…
KellyBoost is a single multi-output XGBoost model whose softmax output is the portfolio: with y the vector of per-asset holding-period returns, the training loss is - log(1 + w y), the negative log growth rate, so the fitted model is the growth-optimal…
PAPER REPORTS · KellyBoost (searched, gross of costs), 2013-01 to 2026-07, 163 monthly decisions: mean log growth 0.47 (x100 per 20-day… · KellyBoost hand-built feature pipeline, same period: logG 0.39, annualized return 5.7%, vol 22.9%, Sharpe 0.28, max DD…
Investors interpret social disclosures from a risk perspective, yet relevant information can reach them through channels that differ sharply in regulatory enforcement and materiality: SEC filings, sustainability reports, or financial reports.
Using neural networks for stock return prediction typically requires choices about depth and hidden-layer width that are difficult to connect to financial interpretation.
PAPER REPORTS · HNN (marginal): pooled out-of-sample R2 0.509% (vs zero forecast), 1987-2016 · HNN (marginal): gross equal-weighted decile long-short spread 3.95% per month, 1987-2016
As more investors contemplate private markets and contend with limited transparency, sparse disclosures, and infrequent transactions, identifying economically meaningful peer companies for comparison is a fundamental challenge for valuation, due diligence,…
PAPER REPORTS · Out-of-sample log-valuation MAE 1.08, RMSE 1.44, R^2 0.46, MAPE 0.06, MdAPE 0.05 (CatBoost, 20% held-out test set… · Relative improvement over OLS baseline: MAE +8%, RMSE +8%, R^2 +28%, MAPE +14%, MdAPE 0%
The paper considers the problem of variable selection for forecasting electricity spot prices.
PAPER REPORTS · BMT hourly rMAE averaged across six areas: 0.501 (2022-2025 out-of-sample, no transaction-cost concept; rMAE < 1 means… · BMT daily baseload rMAE_t averaged across six areas: 0.408 (2022-2025)
Cryptocurrency exchange-traded products (ETPs) listed on European exchanges provide a regulated environment for studying intraday market anomalies.
PAPER REPORTS · AUC-ROC up to 0.823 for one-bar-ahead DPOT prediction (LR, cumulative features, VIRBTC.ST), out-of-sample last 20% of… · AUC-ROC 0.821 for DPOT, LR, cumulative, VBTC.XE; 0.812 session-based
Foundation models for time series forecasting demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization but often underperform on specialized domains such as high-frequency finance.
PAPER REPORTS · Mean per-day correlation 0.3730 (GatedLinear+RF, 40 test days per stock, Dec 2024-Jan 2026 sample, transaction costs… · Pooled correlation 0.5972 and cross-day correlation 0.5631 (GatedLinear+RF, same 40-day test window)
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe -0.42 · Return -0.6% · Max DD -0.8%
Neural and numerical policy solvers can produce feasible controls even when the optimal rule and its binding constraints are unavailable.
Informed traders are supposed to need anonymity: they profit by hiding among the uninformed. A decentralized exchange now publishes the counterparty. Every committed order, cancellation, rejection, and fill carries a persistent pseudonymous wallet address.
PAPER REPORTS · One-second out-of-sample R2: 10.88% anonymous vs 12.31% with identity, +13.2% relative (t=9.2), ridge, evaluation July… · Gradient-boosted trees, one second: 19.48% -> 20.65%, +6.0% (t=5.0), same evaluation window, no costs
Financial sentiment classifiers are commonly evaluated against human labels, but strong linguistic performance does not necessarily imply economically useful return predictability. This study separates these questions through two experiments.
PAPER REPORTS · One-day mean rank IC, 2019 Benzinga S&P 100 sample: FinBERT 0.0143 (largest), Financial-RoBERTa 0.0141, Naive Bayes… · FinBERT one-day long–short: gross total return 12.96%, annualized Sharpe 1.11, max drawdown -6.37% (2019, gross — no…
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe -1.16 · Return -61.4% · Max DD -64.2%
Factor structures are central to empirical work in economics and finance, and are usually used to model time-varying unobserved heterogeneity through interactive fixed effects (IFE).
We introduce data-driven measures of high-frequency trading (HFT) that distinguish between liquidity-supplying and liquidity-demanding strategies.
Production forecasting systems retrain models regularly, but a retrained candidate does not necessarily outperform a continuously maintained incumbent that has continued to learn.
PAPER REPORTS · Metric is negative log-likelihood of a 3-class 300s direction forecast, not trading P&L; no Sharpe, return, alpha or… · Pooled 48 weeks (4 Aug 2025 - 5 Jul 2026, Binance USD-M + COIN-M, 8 underlyings, 3 seeds): SBS relative NLL reduction…
We audit whether candle-based machine-learning models can turn predictions of cryptocurrency extrema or short-horizon outcomes into positive Binance Spot paper policies after assumed costs.
PAPER REPORTS · Frozen mandatory-daily selector: -6.72% compounded, 2026-07-01 to 07-19, 19 cycles, 3 wins/16 losses, 31 bps… · Frozen mandatory-daily selector cost stress, same period: -4.74% at 20 bps, -6.72% at 31 bps, -10.21% at 51 bps…
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe 0.00 · Return +0.0% · Max DD 0.0%
Using the outbreak of COVID-19 in Singapore as a quasi-natural experiment, we investigate tenants' changing responses to road traffic noise in the rental housing market, using 46,980 transaction records between 2006 and 2022.