Research
A continuously updated feed of research papers that pass our automated relevance screening for systematic trading — plus every paper we have published a review of, whatever it scored. Particular focus on alpha hypotheses that can be formalised and tested. The Radar also covers portfolio construction, market risk and execution where the research is directly relevant to systematic investment processes. Follow new entries by RSS.
15,697 papers screened · 250 on the radar · 8 shown
Portfolio risk assessment ordinarily relies on reliable estimates of cross-asset return covariances, which are difficult to obtain in short, high-dimensional panels.
PAPER REPORTS · In-sample standardized variance percentile of the news-only allocation: 0.69%-1.33% across four prespecified capped… · Standardized in-sample variance 0.357, 8.3% below the equal-risk (inverse-volatility) benchmark and 35.6% above the…
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe 0.47 · Return +44.2% · Max DD -29.9%
Algorithmic trading now represents a market exceeding $20 billion, where even marginal gains in signal robustness can translate into economically significant returns.
PAPER REPORTS · Hybrid ensemble, OOS 2025 (252 trading days), 2.2bp per trade per leg: total return 51.26%, Sharpe 2.44, Sortino 5.35,… · Hybrid ensemble, OOS 2025: annualised CAPM alpha 0.423 (p = 0.011), beta 0.048, Probabilistic Sharpe Ratio 0.960
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe 0.75 · Return +696.5% · Max DD -365.1%
Human capital is a central organizational input, but standard financial data reveal little about firm-specific disruptions to workforce availability, cost, skills, and continuity.
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe 0.56 · Return +50.1% · Max DD -40.8%
Two old market sayings hold that news is already priced in by the time it is published, and that the rumor is bought while the news is sold. Both place the price move associated with a piece of news before and at publication rather than after it.
PAPER REPORTS · Fade small-cap launch/partnership news (short after positive, buy after negative; enter close of day +5, exit close of… · Short any covered small cap (sentiment-ignoring benchmark, 260,472 events, same windows, 2023-2026): 15.9% annualized,…
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe -0.23 · Return -18.9% · Max DD -51.9%
Foundation models for time series forecasting demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization but often underperform on specialized domains such as high-frequency finance.
PAPER REPORTS · Mean per-day correlation 0.3730 (GatedLinear+RF, 40 test days per stock, Dec 2024-Jan 2026 sample, transaction costs… · Pooled correlation 0.5972 and cross-day correlation 0.5631 (GatedLinear+RF, same 40-day test window)
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe -0.42 · Return -0.6% · Max DD -0.8%
Financial sentiment classifiers are commonly evaluated against human labels, but strong linguistic performance does not necessarily imply economically useful return predictability. This study separates these questions through two experiments.
PAPER REPORTS · One-day mean rank IC, 2019 Benzinga S&P 100 sample: FinBERT 0.0143 (largest), Financial-RoBERTa 0.0141, Naive Bayes… · FinBERT one-day long–short: gross total return 12.96%, annualized Sharpe 1.11, max drawdown -6.37% (2019, gross — no…
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe -1.16 · Return -61.4% · Max DD -64.2%
Agentic AI is gaining acceptance in asset management, but governance has not kept pace: 88% of surveyed finance professionals report no operational governance framework for agentic AI despite universal awareness of its deployment, and only 24 of 75 large U.S.
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe -1.47 · Return -45.1% · Max DD -49.7%
Recent advances in Generative AI have substantially improved financial sentiment analysis through post-trained financial large language models (LLMs).
PAPER REPORTS · FinSMART (static): cumulative return 264.9%, annualized return 91.5%, Sharpe 1.97, Sortino 2.40, Calmar 4.23, RankIC… · FinSMART (periodically retrained every 6 months): cumulative return 406.2%, annualized return 125.7%, Sharpe 2.41,…
OUR BACKTEST · Sharpe -0.46 · Return -48.2% · Max DD -75.2%