IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/finlet/v27y2018icp214-222.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Picking up the pennies in front of the bulldozer: The profitability of gilt based trading strategies

Author

Listed:
  • Quinn, Barry
  • Hanna, Alan
  • MacDonald, Fred

Abstract

We develop a simple cointegrated pairs trading strategy, including automatic risk control and adjustment for short-selling costs. We applied the strategy to the previously untested and highly liquid market for gilt futures. Profitability is exploited through the mean reversion in the relationship between long and medium gilt futures, and between medium and short gilt futures. Results show the potential for arbitrage profits exists, even using a relatively unsophisticated model, particularly between long and medium gilt futures.

Suggested Citation

  • Quinn, Barry & Hanna, Alan & MacDonald, Fred, 2018. "Picking up the pennies in front of the bulldozer: The profitability of gilt based trading strategies," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 27(C), pages 214-222.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:finlet:v:27:y:2018:i:c:p:214-222
    DOI: 10.1016/j.frl.2018.03.019
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1544612318301636
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.frl.2018.03.019?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bradley, Michael G. & Lumpkin, Stephen A., 1992. "The Treasury Yield Curve as a Cointegrated System," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 27(3), pages 449-463, September.
    2. Binh Do & Robert Faff, 2012. "Are Pairs Trading Profits Robust To Trading Costs?," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 35(2), pages 261-287, June.
    3. Michael Dueker & Richard Startz, 1998. "Maximum-Likelihood Estimation Of Fractional Cointegration With An Application To U.S. And Canadian Bond Rates," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 80(3), pages 420-426, August.
    4. 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.
    5. Haug, Alfred A, 1991. "Cointegration and Government Borrowing Constraints: Evidence for the United States," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 9(1), pages 97-101, January.
    6. Campbell, John Y & Shiller, Robert J, 1987. "Cointegration and Tests of Present Value Models," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 95(5), pages 1062-1088, October.
    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. Gupta, Kartikay & Chatterjee, Niladri, 2020. "Selecting stock pairs for pairs trading while incorporating lead–lag relationship," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 551(C).

    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. Ilias Lekkos, 2003. "Cross‐sectional Restrictions on the Spot and Forward Term Structures of Interest Rates and Panel Unit Root Tests," Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(5‐6), pages 799-828, June.
    2. 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].
    3. Tilak Abeysinghe & Ananda Jayawickrama, 2013. "A segmented trend model to assess fiscal sustainability: The US experience 1929–2009," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 44(3), pages 1129-1141, June.
    4. Cunado, J. & Gil-Alana, L. A. & Perez de Gracia, F., 2004. "Is the US fiscal deficit sustainable?: A fractionally integrated approach," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 56(6), pages 501-526.
    5. Baiquan Ma & Robert Ślepaczuk, 2022. "The profitability of pairs trading strategies on Hong-Kong stock market: distance, cointegration, and correlation methods," Working Papers 2022-02, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw.
    6. 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.
    7. Hualde, J. & Robinson, P.M., 2007. "Root-n-consistent estimation of weak fractional cointegration," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 140(2), pages 450-484, October.
    8. Clegg, Matthew & Krauss, Christopher, 2016. "Pairs trading with partial cointegration," FAU Discussion Papers in Economics 05/2016, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Institute for Economics.
    9. Arshanapalli, Bala & Doukas, John, 1994. "Common stochastic trends in a system of Eurocurrency rates," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 18(6), pages 1047-1061, December.
    10. Siklos, Pierre L. & Wohar, Mark E., 1996. "Cointegration and the term structure: A multicountry comparison," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 21-34.
    11. Alexander Lipton & Marcos Lopez de Prado, 2020. "A closed-form solution for optimal mean-reverting trading strategies," Papers 2003.10502, arXiv.org.
    12. Kryzanowski, Lawrence & Xu, Kuan, 1997. "Long-term equilibria of yields on taxable and tax-exempt bonds," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 119-143.
    13. Ramos-Requena, J.P. & Trinidad-Segovia, J.E. & Sánchez-Granero, M.A., 2017. "Introducing Hurst exponent in pair trading," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 488(C), pages 39-45.
    14. Ananda Jayawickrama & Tilak Abeysinghe, 2006. "Sustainability of Fiscal Deficits : The US Experience 1929-2004," Governance Working Papers 21924, East Asian Bureau of Economic Research.
    15. Du, Lilun & Lan, Wei & Luo, Ronghua & Zhong, Pingshou, 2018. "Factor-adjusted multiple testing of correlations," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 128(C), pages 34-47.
    16. Sánchez-Granero, M.A. & Balladares, K.A. & Ramos-Requena, J.P. & Trinidad-Segovia, J.E., 2020. "Testing the efficient market hypothesis in Latin American stock markets," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 540(C).
    17. GholamReza Keshavarz Haddad & Hassan Talebi, 2023. "The profitability of pair trading strategy in stock markets: Evidence from Toronto stock exchange," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(1), pages 193-207, January.
    18. Kremer, Manfred, 1999. "Die Kapitalmarktzinsen in Deutschland und den USA: Wie eng ist der Zinsverbund? Eine Anwendung der multivariaten Kointegrationsanalyse," Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies 1999,02, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    19. Dominguez, Emilio & Novales, Alfonso, 2000. "Testing the expectations hypothesis in Eurodeposits," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(5), pages 713-736, October.
    20. Viviana Fanelli & Claudio Fontana & Francesco Rotondi, 2023. "A hidden Markov model for statistical arbitrage in international crude oil futures markets," Papers 2309.00875, arXiv.org.

    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:eee:finlet:v:27:y:2018:i:c:p:214-222. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/frl .

    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.