Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Pairs Trading: Performance of a Relative Value Arbitrage Rule

Contents:

Author Info

  • William N. Goetzmann

    () (Yale University, School of Management)

  • Evan Geov Gatev

    () (Department of Finance)

  • K. Geert Rouwenhorst

    () (School of Management)

Abstract

We test a Wall Street investment strategy known as "pairs trading" with daily data over the period 1962 through 1997. Stocks are matched into pairs according to minimum distance in historical normalized price space. We test the profitability of several trading rules with six-month trading periods over the 1962-1997 period, and find average annualized excess returns of up to 12 percent for a number of self-financing portfolios of top pairs. Part of these profits may be due to market microstructure effects. Nevertheless, our historical trading profits exceed a conservative estimate of transaction costs through most of the period. We bootstrap random pairs in order to distinguish pairs trading from pure mean-reversion strategies. The bootstrap results suggest that the ?pairs? effect differs from previously documented mean reversion profits.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=141615
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Yale School of Management in its series Yale School of Management Working Papers with number ysm109.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: 28 Dec 1998
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm109

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://icf.som.yale.edu/
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Mark J Ready, 2002. "Profits from Technical Trading Rules," Financial Management, Financial Management Association, vol. 31(3), Fall.
  2. Petersen, Mitchell A. & Fialkowski, David, 1994. "Posted versus effective spreads *1: Good prices or bad quotes?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 269-292, June.
  3. Chen, Zhiwu & Knez, Peter J, 1995. "Measurement of Market Integration and Arbitrage," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 8(2), pages 287-325.
  4. Charles M. C. Lee & James Myers & Bhaskaran Swaminathan, 1999. "What is the Intrinsic Value of the Dow?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(5), pages 1693-1741, October.
  5. Fama, Eugene F & French, Kenneth R, 1996. " Multifactor Explanations of Asset Pricing Anomalies," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 51(1), pages 55-84, March.
  6. Jegadeesh, Narasimhan & Titman, Sheridan, 1993. " Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(1), pages 65-91, March.
  7. Bossaerts, Peter, 1988. "Common nonstationary components of asset prices," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 12(2-3), pages 347-364.
  8. Brock, William & Lakonishok, Josef & LeBaron, Blake, 1992. " Simple Technical Trading Rules and the Stochastic Properties of Stock Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 47(5), pages 1731-64, December.
  9. KENT D. DANIEL & David Hirshleifer & AVANIDHAR SUBRAHMANYAM, 2004. "A Theory of Overconfidence, Self-Attribution, and Security Market Under- and Over-reactions," Finance 0412006, EconWPA.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm109

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.