Evaluation of pairs trading strategy at the Brazilian financial market

Marcelo Perlin

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Pairs trading is a popular trading strategy that tries to take advantage of market inefficiencies in order to obtain profit. The idea is simple: find two stocks that move together and take long/short positions when they diverge abnormally, hoping that the prices will converge in the future. From the academic point of view of weak market efficiency theory, pairs trading strategy shouldn’t present positive performance since, according to it, the actual price of a stock reflects its past trading data, including historical prices. This leaves us with a question, does pairs trading strategy presents positive performance for the Brazilian market? The main objective of this research is to verify the performance and risk of pairs trading in the Brazilian financial market for different frequencies of the database, daily, weekly and monthly prices for the same time period. The main conclusion of this simulation is that pairs trading strategy was a profitable and market neutral strategy at the Brazilian Market. Such profitability was consistent over a region of the strategy’s parameters. The best results were found for the highest frequency (daily), which is an intuitive result.

Keywords: pairs trading; quantitative strategy; asset allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C10 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mst
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/8308/1/MPRA_paper_8308.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:8308

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().