Commodity, Equity Index and Currency Popular Pairs Trading

Are technical rules applied to pairs trading attractive after correcting for data snooping bias? In their March 2018 paper entitled “Pairs Trading, Technical Analysis and Data Snooping: Mean Reversion vs Momentum”, Ioannis Psaradellis, Jason Laws, Athanasios Pantelous and Georgios Sermpinis test a variety of technical trading rules for long-short trading of 15 commodity futures, equity indexes and currency pairs (all versus the U.S. dollar) frequently used on trading websites or offered by financial market firms. Specifically, they test 18,412 trend-following/momentum and contrarian/mean-reversion rules often applied by traders to past daily pair return spreads. They consider average excess (relative to short-term interest rate) return and Sharpe ratio as key metrics for rule selection and performance measurement. They use False Discovery Rate (FDR) to control for data snooping bias, such that 90% of the equally weighted best rules in FDR-corrected portfolios significantly outperform the benchmark. Most tests are in-sample. To test robustness of findings, they: (1) account for one-way trading frictions ranging from 0.02% to 0.05% across assets; (2) consider five subperiods to test consistency over time; and, (3) perform out-of-sample tests using the first part of each subperiod to select the best rules and roughly the last year to measure performance of these rules out-of-sample. Using daily prices of specified assets and daily short-term interest rates for selected currencies during January 1990 (except ethanol starts late March 2006) through mid-December 2016, they find that:

(more…)