Death tolls from the ongoing 2019 Novel Corona-virus surpassed 1000 this morning, with over 42,638 reported cases at the time of writing. The equities market has not been spared either, with most stocks in Greater China plummeting as a result of investor fears and extended closure of businesses.

Quantflix presents to you a few selected stocks and their recent performances in the midst of the epidemic.

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Overview

2020 started off on a ghastly note in stark contrast to the records-breaking year of 2019 for the markets – the killing of Iran’s Soleimani which sent oil prices close to $70 a barrel, continued bush fires in Australia, the impeachment inquiry of Trump, Saudi Arabia’s alleged hacking of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ phone. Yet, these shocks paled in comparison to the wide-reaching impacts of the recent 2019-nCoV outbreak.

Deat...

Actually this is only breaking news in the English media. There has been a buzz of activity over the weekend about the poor performance of the Greenwoods funds, and the background of founder George Jiang. It got so bad that the firm had to issue an official statement saying the rumors (eg. Jiang has disappeared, had connections with government officials) were false and legal actions will be taken against those who spread fake...

Usually funds try to raise money more aggressively after they have had a good streak. So I’m intrigued when our system detects this:

Maybe Quantflix has become so famous that I’m being offered early access! Just 3 months of results was a little strange but perhaps the fund has only been around for a quarter.

I did some googling to see how this fund started. This fund was launched during Hedgeweek in June 2018, with the co-CEOs “...

The Wealthfront Risk Parity Fund, launched in early 2018, has come under fire from numerous critics, with some citing it as a “volatile product that has underperformed benchmarks and contains difficult-to-understand costs, and a launch that automatically opted users into the fund, rather than allowing them to join of their own volition.”

Having built its reputation investing their client’s money in mutual funds and ETFs, The We...

Disastrous bets on Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Herbalife crippled Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management (“Pershing”). However, 2019 has seen Ackman’s hedge fund roaring back – it is up 37.7% in 2019.

Pershing’s recent rise has been fuelled by its current holdings, in which all but The Howard Hughes Corp (up 9.24%) are up by at least double digits. Meanwhile, Ackman stresses that his investments in Chipotle and Starbu...

Looks like the Captain Magic saga is not over yet. Bloomberg tells us that it "all started over lunch at a Dubai restaurant" so the moral of the story is not to talk about high tech stuff in a restaurant. First of all it's hard to demonstrate your computing prowess in a food establishment. More importantly, aren't such things supposed to be super secretive? My quant managers wouldn't even let me keep that piece of paper/napkin...

And not anyone can tell who's a quant.

A rich Hong Kong guy Li opened a $5 billion account with Raffaele Costa's Tyndaris Investments, and Li is now suing Costa because Costa "exaggerated his supercomputer's trading abilities" and the algorithm-driven trades lost money, supposedly some $23 million within three months.

Losing $23 million when $2.5 billion was committed means a loss of less than 1%. What seems to be the problem?

1....

I get a Bloomberg alert that ex-Citadel hedge fund star Jonathan Graham is launching his new firm, Aquatic Capital Management, from Paloma. Naturally I type "Aquatic Capital" in my Google browser to find out what this is all about:

Aquatic Capital is the fourth course from the Heroes story in Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity. Aquatic Capital is a city lying in the vicinity of Monopole, next to Dr. Eggman's MeteorTech Premises. There...

Jim Simons launched Renaissance Technologies after leaving academia and in 1988 started the Medallion Fund, which through last year generated an annual average net return of about 40 percent, according to Bloomberg. So if you started with $1 then you would have roughly $30K. Which means if you started with $1K you would have $30M. I know, this sounds like a total scam, which prompted the SEC to study the fund after the Bernard...

It is no secret that investors are curious to know the attributing factors to a stellar or weak fund performance, and many refer to the Form 13F disclosure of the fund’s long only holdings. The Form 13F is a quarterly report mandated by the SEC for institutional investment managers with at least $100 million in equity assets under management to disclose U.S. equity holdings. Although the disclosed data is 45 days late, it acts...

Apart from being the mostly widely followed news since July 2018, investors are becoming increasingly concerned as China and the US embark upon a full-scale trade war with both sides implementing new trade tariffs. The latest data from the US Department of Commerce posted recently, albeit being delayed by the long-standing US government shutdown, showed data alluding to a narrowing trade deficit with China. This is led by a mo...

Quantflix is back! We took a break early November from writing articles and stopped accepting new subscribers to retool the site to better cater to users… and stop the site from crashing. Then we had Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, and now Chinese New Year which caused some slight delay. Ok I also went snowboarding and it was difficult enough to ride and drink beer at the same time, so typing coherently was out of the quest...

We talk to HCM Rapier, a global macro fund, on how it was up almost 2% in October when not only did markets fall, but also many hedge fund strategies. This brings the fund’s YTD returns past 10%.

Shun Hong Liu, Founder & PM:

“HCM should be up around 1.8% in October. The increase in volatility helps us as we short EUR, AUD, NZD and long JPY, KRW, INR, IDR. Please note that virtually all the currencies fell against USD but some ou...

Levitas ARVIX Fund is up 4% this month but says their model had expected a return closer to 7-10%. The difference is due to VIX trading significantly below single stock implied volatility.

Single stock implied vol (as measured by the top S&P 100 large cap names) is trading at Aug ‘15 highs yet VIX is trading some 15 point lower. This was the last major broad-based multi-asset sell-off. Implied correlation is currently tracking...