Time-Series Momentum
sign of the 12-month own returnEach instrument's own past twelve-month return predicts its future return. A positive sign means long, negative means short, with the position sized by inverse volatility.
Every strategy carries its exact rules, an annotated chart of the setup, the research behind why it should work at all — and the conditions under which you should not take it.
Showing 1–7 of 7 matching strategies
Each instrument's own past twelve-month return predicts its future return. A positive sign means long, negative means short, with the position sized by inverse volatility.
Raw momentum is a trap: a fixed percentage move is enormous in a quiet market and entirely ordinary in a volatile one. A fixed threshold has no idea which regime it is in.
Every other momentum page in this book asks whether this instrument is trending. This one asks a different question: of the currencies available, which have been strongest, and which weakest?
Borrow in a currency with a low interest rate, hold one with a high rate, and pocket the difference. Uncovered interest parity says the high-rate currency should fall by exactly enough to cancel that out. It does not — a finding so robust it has its own name, the forward premium puzzle, and so old it is now approaching fifty years of replication.
Carry's losses are not spread evenly through time. They arrive in bursts, and those bursts coincide with rising global currency volatility — which is the single most useful thing anyone has discovered about managing this trade.
A central bank's current rate is known to everybody and priced into everything. What moves a currency is the change in what the market expects the rate to be in six or twelve months — and that expectation moves constantly, in observable ways, between meetings.
Carry and momentum are both well-evidenced in currencies, and — this is the useful part — they lose money at different times. Carry unwinds when volatility spikes; momentum suffers in choppy, reversing markets. Holding both is not twice the risk, it is a meaningfully smoother version of either.
The mechanism has peer-reviewed, FX-specific research behind it.
The mechanism is sound, but at least one step of it is untested.
Practitioner literature only — no published research supports the mechanism.
It rates the mechanism — whether there is published research explaining why the market should behave this way. It does not rate profit. Strong does not mean the trade will work. None of these have been run on our own account, and no page here shows a backtest figure.
One instrument, one timeframe, every rule visible on the chart.
Several conditions have to line up, and execution starts to matter.
Needs an outside data feed, a basket, real order flow, or an unusual tolerance for lumpy losses.
The level describes what it takes to run the strategy, not how well it works. Several Beginner pages are better evidenced than several Professional ones — a basket carry trade is Professional because it needs eight currencies and a swap table, not because it is cleverer than buying a pullback.
Reading the library is free. A plan is what lets you turn one into a robot.
Trading carries risk and most retail accounts lose money. Nothing in this library is financial advice or a recommendation to trade. The charts are illustrations of the rules on constructed candles — they are not records of trades and not backtests.