Tag Archives: Pairs Trading

Swing Trading vs Day Trading: Which Actually Compounds Monthly Returns With Shallow Drawdowns?

And What the Death of the Pattern Day Trader (“PDT”) Rule Means for You day trading vs. swing trading

 Most trading careers don’t end in a dramatic blow-up. They end in attrition: an equity curve that grinds sideways with violent swings, a strong month handed back to one overnight gap, an edge quietly eaten alive by spreads and slippage, and a trader burned out from staring at screens for outcomes that never compound.

If that pattern is familiar, the usual question — “which style suits my personality?” — is the wrong one. That’s the amateur’s question. The professional question is colder: which trading style is structurally built to deliver a compounding monthly return,

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Pair Trading Strategy Enhancement

Go Hybrid: Mean-Reversion Framework PLUS Technical Bias Filtering pair trading strategy enhancement

Pairs trading remains one of the most widely used market-neutral strategies, built on the principle of exploiting mean reversion in a spread constructed from two related assets. However, traditional implementations—typically based on cointegration tests and z-score entry/exit thresholds—face well-documented limitations, including instability across regimes and declining profitability in modern markets (Tenyakov & Mamon, 2017). So in this blog post we suggest our own pair trading strategy enhancement: combine cointegration and z-score based trading signals with refined technical trading indicators to create a Relative Edge indicator.

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Kalman Filters vs. PairTrade Finder®

Why We Keep It Simple (On Purpose) Kalman filters

From time to time, experienced traders reach out and ask:

“Why doesn’t PairTrade Finder® use a Kalman filter to calculate dynamic hedge ratios?”

It’s a fair question. Kalman filters are widely used in quantitative finance and are often presented as a more advanced way to trade pairs.

So this post explains our thinking clearly.

PairTrade Finder® is designed to capture most of the statistical edge—without the complexity that often reduces real-world performance.

In practice, as a rule we seek to target a platform that delivers 80% of the benefit of institutional grade models with around 20% of the complexity.

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Learn to Trade Stock Pairs: Monday Morning Thoughts for Inspiration

Exhaustive and robust academic research of stock pair trading strategies on the S&P 500 show consistent trading gains.  Stock pair trading, especially using cointegration for selecting pairs, has shown historic profitability of up to 5% per month.  Learn to trade stock pairs in our 30 Minute Webinar.  Sign up for a 15-Day Free Trial and get our eBook Trade Like a Hedge Fund for free.

Learn to Trade Stock Pairs Today!

Free triallers also receive access to our Pair Trading Video Training Course.  Taught by a professional pair trader, this series presents pair trading in simple, easily accessible terms. 

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