Winning Investment Strategies Based on Financial Crisis Indicators

The aim of this work is to create systematic trading strategies built upon several financial crisis indicators based on the spectral properties of market dynamics. Within the limitations of our framework and data, we will demonstrate that our systematic trading strategies are able to make money, not as a result of pure luck but, in a reproducible way and while avoiding the pitfall of over fitting, as a result of the skill of the operators and their understanding and knowledge of the financial market. Using singular value decomposition (SVD) techniques in order to compute all spectra in an efficient way, we have built two kinds of financial crisis indicators with a demonstrable power of prediction. Firstly, there are those that compare at every date the distribution of the eigenvalues of a covariance or correlation matrix to a distribution of reference representing either a calm or agitated market reference. Secondly, we have those that merely compute at every date a chosen spectral property (trace, spectral radius or Frobenius norm) of a covariance or correlation matrix. Aggregating the signals provided by all the indicators in order to minimize false positive errors, we then build systematic trading strategies based on a discrete set of rules governing the investment decisions of the investor. Finally, we compare our active strategies to a passive reference as well as to random strategies in order to prove the usefulness of our approach and the added value provided by the out-of-sample predictive power of the financial crisis indicators upon which our systematic trading strategies are built.