Statistical arbitrage covers strategies that trade temporary mispricings between related instruments: classic pairs trading, cointegration-based baskets, and mean-reversion signals across equities, futures, and crypto. It is one of the few strategy families where academic papers regularly include real backtests, which makes the rigor score especially useful here.
When reading this literature, three questions separate implementable work from curve-fitting: Does the paper account for transaction costs and shorting constraints? Is the pair-selection rule defined before the backtest window? And does performance survive the post-2010 period, when the classic distance method famously decayed? Papers ranked highly below tend to answer at least two of these.
Related hubs: Market Microstructure, Machine Learning for Forecasting, High-Frequency Trading.
Explainers from the corpus: ARDL models: appropriate use vs p-hacking →
This paper examines whether a cointegration-based pairs trading strategy between PepsiCo and The Coca-Cola Company is statistically robust and economically exploitable. We first test for cointegration and estimate the spread’s mean-reversion dynamics over 2013-2018, then hold these statistical param
We introduce the Historical and Dynamic Volatility Ratios (HVR/DVR) and show that equity and index volatilities are cointegrated at intraday and daily horizons. This allows us to construct a VECM to forecast portfolio volatility by exploiting volatility cointegration. On S&P 500 data, HVR is general
Equity market dynamics are conventionally investigated in name space where stocks are indexed by company names. In contrast, by indexing stocks based on their ranks in capitalization, we gain a different perspective of market dynamics in rank space. Here, we demonstrate the superior performance of s
We employ a Bayesian modelling technique for high dimensional cointegration estimation to construct low volatility portfolios from a large number of stocks. The proposed Bayesian framework effectively identifies sparse and important cointegration relationships amongst large baskets of stocks across
What is the demand elasticity of statistical arbitrageurs that invest according to the advice of modern cross-sectional asset pricing models? Thirteen models from the literature exhibit strikingly inelastic demand, in contrast to classical models that rely on statistical arbitrageurs to create elast
Recently, LLMs (Large Language Models) have been adapted for time series prediction with significant success in pattern recognition. However, the common belief is that these models are not suitable for predicting financial market returns, which are known to be almost random. We aim to challenge this
This paper concerns the numerical valuation of swing options with discrete action times under a linear two-factor mean-reverting model with jumps. The resulting sequence of two-dimensional partial integro-differential equations (PIDEs) are convection-dominated and possess a nonlocal integral term du
In this paper we study the quality of model-free valuation approaches for financial derivatives by systematically evaluating the difference between model-free super-hedging strategies and the realized payoff of financial derivatives using historical option prices from several constituents of the S&P
Pairs trading, a strategy that capitalizes on price movements of asset pairs driven by similar factors, has gained significant popularity among traders. Common practice involves selecting highly cointegrated pairs to form a portfolio, which often leads to the inclusion of multiple pairs sharing comm
In this work, we study statistical arbitrage strategies in international crude oil futures markets. We analyse strategies that extend classical pairs trading strategies, considering the two benchmark crude oil futures (Brent and WTI) together with the newly introduced Shanghai crude oil futures. We
Pair trading is one of the most effective statistical arbitrage strategies which seeks a neutral profit by hedging a pair of selected assets. Existing methods generally decompose the task into two separate steps: pair selection and trading. However, the decoupling of two closely related subtasks can
We propose a two-step graph learning approach for foreign exchange statistical arbitrages (FXSAs), addressing two key gaps in prior studies: the absence of graph-learning methods for foreign exchange rate prediction (FXRP) that leverage multi-currency and currency-interest rate relationships, and th
The primary objective of this research is to build a Momentum Transformer that is expected to outperform benchmark time-series momentum and mean-reversion trading strategies. We extend the ideas introduced in the paper Trading with the Momentum Transformer: An Intelligent and Interpretable Architect
Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) is a classic method to analyse cointegration relationships amongst multivariate non-stationary time series. In this paper, we focus on high dimensional setting and seek for sample-size-efficient methodology to determine the level of cointegration. Our investigati
In this paper, we explore an optimal timing strategy for the trading of price spreads exhibiting mean-reverting characteristics. A sequential optimal stopping framework is formulated to analyze the optimal timings for both entering and subsequently liquidating positions, all while considering the im
We present a Monte Carlo approach to pairs trading on mean-reverting spreads modeled by Lévy-driven Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. Specifically, we focus on using a variance gamma driving process, an infinite activity pure jump process to allow for more flexible models of the price spread than is ava
In a fixed time horizon, appropriately executing a large amount of a particular asset – meaning a considerable portion of the volume traded within this frame – is challenging. Especially for illiquid or even highly liquid but also highly volatile ones, the role of “market quality” is quite relevan
Financial market prediction is a challenging application of machine learning, where even small improvements in directional accuracy can yield substantial value. Most models struggle to exceed 55–57% accuracy due to high noise, non-stationarity, and market efficiency. We introduce a hybrid ensemble f
We study an American option pricing problem with liquidity risks and transaction fees. As endogenous transaction costs, liquidity risks of the underlying asset are modeled by a mean-reverting process. Transaction fees are exogenous transaction costs and are assumed to be proportional to the trading
We consider a conditional factor model for a multivariate portfolio of United States equities in the context of analysing a statistical arbitrage trading strategy. A state space framework underlies the factor model whereby asset returns are assumed to be a noisy observation of a linear combination o
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