More on news-driven trading

For readers who are interested in news-driven trading, here is another article. This article pointed out a contrarian view offered by Richard Oldfield, a fund manager, who says “price movements in response to news are exaggerated, providing an opportunity to those who do not base too much on what has happened in the last hour or 24 hours.” [my italics] I am not sure whether Mr. Oldfield's statement is based on any statistical research or not -- as far as I can ascertain, his book "Simple But Not Easy” cannot be purchased anywhere in North America. However, I should point out that this statement is in contradiction to an abundance of research done on Post Earnings Annoucement Drift (PEAD): the phenomenon that stocks with positive earnings news continue to trend up for a long time. Furthermore, if indeed price movements in response to news are exaggerated (contrary to the findings of PEAD), it would seem to suggest a reversal trade rather than suggesting that the news can be ignored!

Fair value of currencies

In the same issue of the Economist magazine I cited previously, there is an article about the valuation of currencies based on 13 quantitative models that Morgan Stanley developed. They found that the most overvalued currency (against the US dollar) is the New Zealand dollar, while the most undervalued currency is the Japanese Yen.

What about the Chinese Yuan that arouses much hoopla in Congress? The models found it to be almost exactly fairly valued.

News-driven algorithmic trading

There is an article about algorithmic trading in the latest issue of the Economist magazine, where it says that one-third of all stock trades in the US are due to algorithmic trading. This should not surprise us. What is more interesting is its mention of the electronically tagged news products that are coming out of Dow Jones and Reuters, which purportedly enable computers to buy or sell stocks immediately upon the release of a news item. The data suppliers regard these news products as some kind of secret high-tech weapons: "Dow Jones claims the business is so secretive that it cannot divulge details of customers." Is this hype justified?

Actually, to get a taste of news-driven trading, you don't need to pay a hefty fee to buy one of these products. You can just monitor the regularly scheduled economic news release (consumer confidence, new homes sales, crude inventories, etc.), trade the relevant futures, and proceed to make millions.

The fact that most of us who monitor these economic news releases haven't yet made our millions is an indication whether these news products will help you do the same. The information contained in the news is often difficult to interpret. Even the initial price reaction to the news may be wrong, leading to swift reversal after an apparent initial trend. And finally, what's wrong with scanning for sudden price movemenets, and then check for possible news to confirm that the price movement is due to the release of new information?