IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ebg/heccah/1089.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Capacity of Trading Strategies

Author

Listed:
  • Thesmar , David
  • Landier , Augustin

Abstract

Due to non-linear transaction costs, the financial performance of a trading strategy decreases with portfolio size. Using a dynamic trading model a la Garleanu and Pedersen (2013), the authors derive closed-form formulas for the performance-to-scale frontier reached by a trader endowed with a signal predicting stock returns. The decay with scale of the realized Sharpe ratio is slower for strategies that (1) trade more liquid stocks (2) are based on signals that do not fade away quickly and (3) have strong frictionless performance. For an investor ready to accept a Sharpe reduction by 30%, portfolio scale (measured in dollar volatility) is given by a simple formula that is a function of the frictionless Sharpe, a measure of price impact, and a measure of the speed at which the signal fades away. They apply the framework to four well-known strategies. Because stocks have become more liquid, the capacity of strategies has increased in the 2000s compared to the 1990s. Due to high signal persistence, the capacity of a "quality" strategy is an order of magnitude larger than the others and is the only one highly scalable in the mid-cap range.

Suggested Citation

  • Thesmar , David & Landier , Augustin, 2015. "The Capacity of Trading Strategies," HEC Research Papers Series 1089, HEC Paris.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebg:heccah:1089
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2585399
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Itzhak Ben-DAVID & Francesco A. FRANZONI & Rabih MOUSSAWI & John SEDUNOV III, 2015. "The Granular Nature of Large Institutional Investors," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 15-67, Swiss Finance Institute, revised Apr 2016.
    2. Jean‐Philippe Bouchaud & Philipp Krüger & Augustin Landier & David Thesmar, 2019. "Sticky Expectations and the Profitability Anomaly," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 74(2), pages 639-674, April.
    3. Albert J. Menkveld & Bart Zhou Yueshen, 2019. "The Flash Crash: A Cautionary Tale About Highly Fragmented Markets," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(10), pages 4470-4488, October.
    4. Michael J. O'Neill & Geoffrey J. Warren, 2019. "Evaluating fund capacity: issues and methods," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 59(S1), pages 773-800, April.
    5. Jean-Philippe Bouchaud & Stefano Ciliberti & Augustin Landier & Guillaume Simon & David Thesmar, 2016. "The Excess Returns of "Quality" Stocks: A Behavioral Anomaly," Papers 1601.04478, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    trading costs; asset pricing anomalies; asset management; arbitrage;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebg:heccah:1089. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Antoine Haldemann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/hecpafr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.