A Novel Optimal Profit Resilient Filter Pairs Trading Strategy for Cryptocurrencies

Pairs trading strategies are constructed based on exploiting mean reversion in security prices, which have been demonstrated to perform well for stocks. However, their performance is not widely studied for cryptocurrencies, which are usually discerned as inefficient and unpredictable. One significant advantage of pairs trading is that potential profits can be generated regardless of the overall market movement. The pairs trading has the potential to be profitable for cryptocurrencies in bear markets and with intraday data. Kalman filter (KF) algorithms are popular for pairs trading to update the hedge ratio dynamically. They reduce the arbitrariness in parameter optimization by putting constraints on the parameter space. However, a major drawback is that the innovation volatility estimate calculated by using a KF algorithm is always affected by the initial values and outliers. An effective resilient filtering approach to estimate the innovation volatility is presented in this paper for cryptocurrencies. This paper presents rolling regression pairs trading strategies, traditional KF pairs trading strategies and resilient filter pairs trading strategies. The proposed trading strategies have been evaluated through some experiments on hourly Bitcoin USD and Ethereum USD prices and it is shown that the proposed resilient filter trading strategy is much more stable to initial values than the traditional KF trading strategy.