In the world of finance and investments, statistical arbitrage is used in two related but distinct ways:
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In academic literature, "statistical arbitrage" is opposed to (deterministic) arbitrage. In deterministic arbitrage, a sure profit can be obtained from being long some securities and short others. In statistical arbitrage, there is a statistical mispricing of one or more assets based on the expected value of these assets. In other words, statistical arbitrage conjectures statistical mispricings of price relationships that are true in expectation, in the long run when repeating a trading strategy.
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Among those who follow the hedge fund industry, "statistical arbitrage" refers to a particular category of hedge funds (other categories include global macro, convertible arbitrage, and so on). In this narrower sense, statistical arbitrage is often abbreviated as Stat Arb or StatArb. According to Andrew Lo, StatArb "refers to highly technical short-term mean-reversion strategies involving large numbers of securities (hundreds to thousands, depending on the amount of risk capital), very short holding periods (measured in days to seconds), and substantial computational, trading, and information technology (IT) infrastructure"
Trading strategy
As a trading strategy, statistical arbitrage is a heavily quantitative and computational approach to equity trading. It involves data mining and statistical methods, as well as automated trading systems.
Historically, StatArb evolved out of the simpler pairs trade strategy, in which stocks are put into pairs by fundamental or market-based similarities. When one stock in a pair outperforms the other, the poorer performing stock is bought long with the expectation that it will climb towards its outperforming partner, the other is sold short. This hedges risk from whole-market movements.
StatArb considers not pairs of stocks but a portfolio of a hundred or more stocks—some long, some short—that are carefully matched by sector and region to eliminate exposure to beta and other risk factors. Portfolio construction is automated and consists of two phases. In the first or "scoring" phase, each stock in the market is assigned a numeric score or rank that reflects its desirability; high scores indicate stocks that should be held long and low scores indicate stocks that are candidates for shorting. The details of the scoring formula vary and are highly proprietary, but, generally (as in pairs trading), they involve a short term mean reversion principle so that, e.g., stocks that have done unusually well in the past week receive low scores and stocks that have underperformed receive high scores. In the second or "risk reduction" phase, the stocks are combined into a portfolio in carefully matched proportions so as to eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, market and factor risk.