QuantRocket Blog

Posts for pipeline

Extracting Structured Datasets for Systematic Strategies from Unstructured Textual Sources: Brain Alternative Datasets

Wed Jul 10 2024 by Francesco Cricchio and Matteo Campellone
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Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a broad field that enables computers to process and analyze unstructured textual data. In this article, we present several proprietary Brain datasets derived from news articles, SEC regulatory filings, and earnings calls, along with case studies implemented in QuantRocket.

Is There Alpha in Borrow Fees?

Wed May 15 2024 by Brian Stanley
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Borrow fees reflect how likely short sellers think a stock is to decline. Can this information be incorporated into trading strategies as an alpha factor? This article uses Alphalens to explore the relationship between borrow fees and forward returns and uses Moonshot and Zipline to demonstrate ways to incorporate borrow fees into long or short strategies.

Researching the Quality Factor with Alphalens and Zipline

Wed Sep 27 2023 by Brian Stanley
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Buying high-quality stocks and avoiding low-quality ones can improve investment returns. In this post, I use Alphalens and Zipline to analyze the Piotroski F-Score, a composite measure of a firm's financial health and quality.

Financial Distress Factors: the Altman Z-Score and Interest Coverage Ratio

Wed Sep 06 2023 by Brian Stanley
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Are rising interest rates straining balance sheets and increasing the risk of bankruptcies? This article investigates two financial distress factors, the Altman Z-Score and interest coverage ratio, to see if distress is on the rise and how it impacts stock returns.

Sector Neutralization: Why It Matters and How to Use It

Mon Aug 21 2023 by Brian Stanley
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Sector neutralization is a technique to hedge out sector bets and reduce the impact of sector-specific risks on the portfolio by ranking factors within sectors rather than across sectors. This post uses the debt-to-equity ratio to show why sector neutralization is important and how to perform it in Pipeline.

What's Better, High Profit Margins or Improving Profit Margins?

Wed Jul 12 2023 by Brian Stanley
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Should investors prefer companies with high profit margins or companies with improving profit margins? Is it better to own an unprofitable company that's getting better, or a profitable company that's getting worse? This post explores these questions by analyzing the profitability growth factor and how it interacts with the profitability and size factors to impact stock performance.

Analyzing the Profitability Factor with Alphalens

Tue Jun 27 2023 by Brian Stanley
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How does a company's profitability affect its stock returns? In this post, I use Alphalens, a Python library for analyzing alpha factors, to investigate the relationship between operating margin, a profitability ratio, and future returns.

Exploratory Data Analysis of Fundamental Factors

Wed Jun 14 2023 by Brian Stanley
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When researching fundamental factors, analyzing alpha shouldn't be your first step. You can save time and spot issues early by starting with a basic exploration of your factor's distribution and statistical properties, a process known as exploratory data analysis (EDA). This post looks at operating margin, a profitability ratio, to demonstrate what you can learn from exploratory data analysis.

Should You Buy or Sell Stocks that Gap Down?

Wed Sep 02 2020 by Brian Stanley
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What happens when strong stocks gap down at the open? A well-known trading strategy is to buy the gap, expecting mean reversion. This post uses Zipline to explore down gaps and finds a profitable strategy based on selling, not buying, the gap.