Divergence on NDX

I generally take a dim view of old-timey technical indicators, perhaps they work for some people but I have found there are much better tool available. One exception is divergence, which in this case is when price makes a new high, but the MACD (or your favourite oscillator) does not.  

There is very nice looking divergence on NDX, and it also shows up in a weaker form on SPX and INDU. I never take it as a trade signal by itself, but it does make me look a little closer. I have marked off some previous occurrences as well. It does not give any indication about when a sell off may occur, or how much of a sell off will eventuate. Pretty useful isn't it?

Another form of divergence I take note of is the marked failure of RUT to make it back to its recent highs, which differs from NDX/SPX/INDU. 

You can also see in the charts above that volume has been declining, especially over the last 4-5 weeks. 

I do think we are in a long run bull market which still has a few more years to go. In the event of a shorter term sell off I would generally be looking to buy dips. 

A good sign of a bull market is shrugging off negative events. We've had some reasonably serious geopolitical happenings, the invasion in Ukraine, a coup in Thailand, and anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam that produced a number of fatalities. 

Struggling to think what a catalyst might be, perhaps some unpleasant surprise regarding QE tapering, or unconstrained collapse in the Chinese property market, both of which I think are pretty unlikely

There's a bunch of macro data out next week, and Apple is having its WWDC. Apple used to make up a very large amount of NDX, something like 24% of the index value was determined by AAPL prices. I know they rebalanced it and am not up to date with where it currently stands.

A quick look at FX realized vol

Much has been said about the decline in volatility. At the moment I am very active in FX spot trading and as a generalization do better the more vol there is.

 I wanted to see how things stood on the crosses I am most active in, namely EUR/USD, GBP/USD and USD/JPY.

 I took hourly data from FxPro (not my broker, nor an endorsement), calculated volatility as the high minus the low, and summed the total for each day. You can think of it as how many pips were on offer if one could correctly call the high and low of each hour of each day.

 All up there is about 90 days of data, so it covers roughly the last four months. I also took the average of the last five days which are the red X’s on the box plots. We are here.

As you can see, vol is below average. It was quiet week overall, bank holidays in the US and parts of Europe, and only a moderate amount of data coming out. Next week should be a bit busier I think.

Since I had all the data I also took at look at the average hourly RV per day.

I don’t want to read too much into this chart but things have been quiet. I read somewhere else fx vol is approaching levels of 2007 which was a very quiet time indeed.

Some R code is up here, data is here.

RcppArmadillo cheatsheet

I have been using RcppArmadillo more and more frequently, so thought I would make a cheatsheet/cookbook type reference that translates common R operations into equivalent arma code.

I have put them up on a github wiki page here.

The functions are all pretty basic and not particularly robust. In particular they do not do any bounds or sanity checking.

You might also enjoy the arma documentation, in particular the matlab/octave syntax conversion example.

There is also an excellent book Seamless R and C++ Integration with Rcpp

Any corrections or additions are most welcome.

Hedge Fund Managers on YouTube

Bill Ackman reads from the book of Buffet

Ray Dalio gives a run down of macroeconomics