Artur Sepp Blog on Quantitative Investment Strategies

I am delighted to share the video from my QuantMinds presentation that I made in Barcelona in December 2021. Many thanks to QuantMinds organizers for allowing me to share this video. First, it was nice to attend the onsite conference in a while and to meet old friends and colleagues. I was positively surprised by how many people attended. Many thanks to organizers for making it happen during these uncertain times!

I presented a framework for the design of sector-based smart beta indices and products for diversified investing to crypto assets. There are thee challenges to account for when designing a systematic strategy on crypto assets.

First, the data quality is poor indeed. We need to tackle the enormous challenge to accommodate and filter data from multiple data providers. Unlike the traditional asset classes, the market data for public data (such as market cap and traded volumes) can be a source of alpha for systematic strategies.

Second, the time history of data is very short. For example, most of protocol tokens for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications were listed during the second half of 2020, which means that we have to ascertain the design and risk-reward profile of a strategy using one year of data.

Third, the liquidity of crypto assets may be insufficient when contrasted with traditional assets. Therefore, we need to carefully design strategies by screening and incorporating the liquidity into the process. One of the challenges is that most crypto exchanges (there are about 30 tier one exchanges) tend to over-estimate their traded volumes.

To overcome these challenges, I constructed a bootstrapping simulation engine which allows to generate joint paths of price and fundamental data for the empirical distributions without breaking the correlation and auto-correlation structure of dependencies in the data.