IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eco/journ1/2013-03-19.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Note on the Effectiveness of Pairs Trading For Individual Investors

Author

Listed:
  • Fabio Pizzutilo

    (Department of Studi Aziendali e Giusprivatistici, University of Bari, Italy)

Abstract

We investigated the profitability of a simple and easily implementable pairs trading strategy that included trading costs and restrictions to short selling so as to replicate an effective strategy exploitable by an individual investor. Notwithstanding the limitations embodied in our model, pairs trading still works. However, the constraints significantly affect the profitability of the strategy. We found evidence that restrictions to the number of shares that are allowed to be shorted have a relevant impact on the risk profile of the pairs portfolios. Our results support the hypothesis that pairs trading is an equity market neutral investment strategy.

Suggested Citation

  • Fabio Pizzutilo, 2013. "A Note on the Effectiveness of Pairs Trading For Individual Investors," International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, Econjournals, vol. 3(3), pages 763-771.
  • Handle: RePEc:eco:journ1:2013-03-19
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econjournals.com/index.php/ijefi/article/download/501/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: http://www.econjournals.com/index.php/ijefi/article/view/501/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Broussard, John Paul & Vaihekoski, Mika, 2012. "Profitability of pairs trading strategy in an illiquid market with multiple share classes," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 22(5), pages 1188-1201.
    2. Jegadeesh, Narasimhan, 1990. "Evidence of Predictable Behavior of Security Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 45(3), pages 881-898, July.
    3. Evan Gatev & William N. Goetzmann & K. Geert Rouwenhorst, 2006. "Pairs Trading: Performance of a Relative-Value Arbitrage Rule," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 19(3), pages 797-827.
    4. Masaki Mori & Alan J. Ziobrowski, 2011. "Performance of Pairs Trading Strategy in the U.S. REIT Market," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 39(3), pages 409-428, September.
    5. Alsayed, Hamad & McGroarty, Frank, 2012. "Arbitrage and the Law of One Price in the market for American depository receipts," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 22(5), pages 1258-1276.
    6. Huck, Nicolas, 2010. "Pairs trading and outranking: The multi-step-ahead forecasting case," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 207(3), pages 1702-1716, December.
    7. Perlin, M., 2007. "Evaluation of pairs trading strategy at the Brazilian financial market," MPRA Paper 8308, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    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


    Cited by:

    1. Johannes St binger & Jens Bredthauer, 2017. "Statistical Arbitrage Pairs Trading with High-frequency Data," International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, Econjournals, vol. 7(4), pages 650-662.
    2. Laila Taskeen Qazi & Atta Ur Rahman & Saleem Gul, 2015. "Which Pairs of Stocks should we Trade? Selection of Pairs for Statistical Arbitrage and Pairs Trading in Karachi Stock Exchange," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 54(3), pages 215-244.
    3. José Pedro Ramos-Requena & Juan Evangelista Trinidad-Segovia & Miguel Ángel Sánchez-Granero, 2020. "An Alternative Approach to Measure Co-Movement between Two Time Series," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(2), pages 1-24, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Krauss, Christopher, 2015. "Statistical arbitrage pairs trading strategies: Review and outlook," FAU Discussion Papers in Economics 09/2015, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Institute for Economics.
    2. Geetu Aggarwal & Navdeep Aggarwal, 2021. "Risk-adjusted Returns from Statistical Arbitrage Opportunities in Indian Stock Futures Market," Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, Springer;Japanese Association of Financial Economics and Engineering, vol. 28(1), pages 79-99, March.
    3. Bruno Breyer Caldas & João Frois Caldeira & Guilherme Vale Moura, 2016. "Is Pairs Trading Performance Sensitive To The Methodologies?: A Comparison," Anais do XLII Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 42nd Brazilian Economics Meeting] 130, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    4. Hossein Rad & Rand Kwong Yew Low & Robert Faff, 2016. "The profitability of pairs trading strategies: distance, cointegration and copula methods," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(10), pages 1541-1558, October.
    5. R. Todd Smith & Xun Xu, 2017. "A good pair: alternative pairs-trading strategies," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 31(1), pages 1-26, February.
    6. Laila Taskeen Qazi & Atta Ur Rahman & Saleem Gul, 2015. "Which Pairs of Stocks should we Trade? Selection of Pairs for Statistical Arbitrage and Pairs Trading in Karachi Stock Exchange," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 54(3), pages 215-244.
    7. Alessia Naccarato & Andrea Pierini & Giovanna Ferraro, 2021. "Markowitz portfolio optimization through pairs trading cointegrated strategy in long-term investment," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 299(1), pages 81-99, April.
    8. Lei, Yaoting & Xu, Jing, 2015. "Costly arbitrage through pairs trading," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 1-19.
    9. Fischer, Thomas & Krauss, Christopher, 2017. "Deep learning with long short-term memory networks for financial market predictions," FAU Discussion Papers in Economics 11/2017, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Institute for Economics.
    10. Zhe Huang & Franck Martin, 2017. "Optimal pairs trading strategies in a cointegration framework," Working Papers halshs-01566803, HAL.
    11. Flori, Andrea & Regoli, Daniele, 2021. "Revealing Pairs-trading opportunities with long short-term memory networks," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 295(2), pages 772-791.
    12. Guglielmo Maria Caporale & Luis Gil-Alana & Alex Plastun, 2017. "Searching for Inefficiencies in Exchange Rate Dynamics," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 49(3), pages 405-432, March.
    13. Nicolas Huck, 2013. "The high sensitivity of pairs trading returns," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(14), pages 1301-1304, September.
    14. Sovan Mitra & Andreas Karathanasopoulos, 2019. "Firm Value and the Impact of Operational Management," Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, Springer;Japanese Association of Financial Economics and Engineering, vol. 26(1), pages 61-85, March.
    15. Andreas Mikkelsen, 2018. "Pairs trading: the case of Norwegian seafood companies," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(3), pages 303-318, January.
    16. João Frois Caldeira & Gulherme Valle Moura, 2013. "Selection of a Portfolio of Pairs Based on Cointegration: A Statistical Arbitrage Strategy," Brazilian Review of Finance, Brazilian Society of Finance, vol. 11(1), pages 49-80.
    17. Karen Balladares & José Pedro Ramos-Requena & Juan Evangelista Trinidad-Segovia & Miguel Angel Sánchez-Granero, 2021. "Statistical Arbitrage in Emerging Markets: A Global Test of Efficiency," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(2), pages 1-20, January.
    18. Fischer, Thomas & Krauss, Christopher, 2018. "Deep learning with long short-term memory networks for financial market predictions," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 270(2), pages 654-669.
    19. Thomas Günter Fischer & Christopher Krauss & Alexander Deinert, 2019. "Statistical Arbitrage in Cryptocurrency Markets," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 12(1), pages 1-15, February.
    20. Bajgrowicz, Pierre & Scaillet, Olivier, 2012. "Technical trading revisited: False discoveries, persistence tests, and transaction costs," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(3), pages 473-491.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Pairs trading; market neutral; Italian stock market; trading strategy; statistical arbitrage; short selling; personal finance;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eco:journ1:2013-03-19. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ilhan Ozturk (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.econjournals.com .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.