Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash
We’ve been talking too much about the attack side of quantitative trading, such as momentum, mean reversion, and ML. These strategies aim to outperform the benchmark/index by adding your personal points of view to the trading strategies. Beating the benchmark becomes the only goal when playing the offense. What about defense? After reading Introduction to CPPI – Constant Proportion Portfolio Insurance, I started to feel that I can’t agree more with the idea of “The best defense is a good offense” once said by Sun Tzu, a Chinese military general, a strategist, and a philosopher. What does defense mean in the field of quantitative trading? Does defense mean we strive not to lose money and then nothing else worth doing? Maybe talking about the CPPI strategy would give us a better picture of what actually defense means to the traders. Let’s now have a look at how to approach the other side of trading.