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Contribution Details

Type Master's Thesis
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Risk and Return Replication of Trend Following Strategies
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Jiani Zhou
Supervisors
  • Cosimo Munari
Language
  • English
Institution University of Zurich
Faculty Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics
Number of Pages 65
Date 2019
Abstract Text This thesis aims to explore and develop approaches to infer the asset positions of managed futures funds and to further replicate their risk pro les. The approaches studied can be cat- egorized into two classes, namely a regression-based, top-down approach, and a trend signal- based, bottom-up approach. The replication problem for return time series is of general theoretical and practical interest. This requires, in particular, the speci cation of trading models and risk models to determine how the daily positions are adjusted based on market prices, risk and diversi cation indicat- ors. On the one hand, our top-down approach aims to replicate a given daily return series within a pre-speci ed investment universe by using regression methods to estimate position weights of individual instruments. The idea is to regress the time series of the strategy's returns against a collection of the returns of the pre-de ned investment universe instruments by employing di erent rolling regressions. Then one can assess the results of varying regression methods and choose the optimal model based on the robustness of the estimators. On the other hand, our bottom-up approach aims to construct a generic trend following strategy that captures the return and risk characteristics of the same benchmark. The method consists of three components. The rst step concerns the trend signal generation using lter techniques. The second step is portfolio construction using a risk budgeting approach. Finally, the last step applies volatility targeting for each asset class and the entire portfolio. Similar to the rst approach, there are a few alternative models available, and the parameters which best feature the performance of the given trend following strategy would be chosen as the optimal one.
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