Detecting Market Regime With the Vertical Horizontal Filter

Detecting Market Regime Changes in Python

Feb 19, 2022

A huge chunk of the time spent trading is spent searching for the the answer to this famous question: “What will the market do next? Range? Trend?”. The answer to this question is a form of holy grail because if we know what will happen then we will be able to choose the right strategy.

Many good strategies fail at some point because the market regime has switched and is no longer representative. Imagine a hypothetical scenario where we know the market will continue to move sideways. A strategy relying on buying the dips and selling the highs should do well, however, the moment the market decides to go in one direction, the strategy will underperform.

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Trend Following Strategies in Python

What is Market Regime?

Markets generally trend or move sideways. We must apply our strategies in the right timing, meaning that mean-reversion strategies should be applied in markets that are moving sideways while trend-following strategies should be applied in markets that are going up or down. This is to maximize the chances of profitability.

For example, a bullish market has more chance to continue to go up than down and therefore, trend-following strategies should outperform because they are backed by the probability of going up. In contrast, mean-reversion strategies should underperform because they will keep giving bearish signals while the market continues to go up.

A reminder: Bullish designates a market that is trending up while bearish designates a market that is trending down.

**An example of a trending market. The regime here is clearly bullish.**

Our job with the Vertical Horizontal Filter is to try to detect the current market state and to see if we can anticipate its end. By this we can say whether the current trend is about to end or whether the current range is about to trend.

Creating the Vertical Horizontal Filter

The Vertical Horizontal Filter was introduced by Adam White and is a measure how strong or weak the markets are trending. This is to be able to choose the appropriate strategy. It is calculated using the following steps:

Calculate the absolute sum of price differences from one period to another. For example, if the current price is $99 and the last price was $100, then the absolute price column should be $1.
Calculate the maximum values in a certain lookback period and subtract it from the minimum value. This means that if the lookback period is 5, then we should look to subtract the highest close from the lowest close in that time period.
Divide the numerator by the denominator to get the Vertical Horizontal Filter.

# The function to add a number of columns inside an array
def adder(Data, times):
    
    for i in range(1, times + 1):
    
        new_col = np.zeros((len(Data), 1), dtype = float)
        Data = np.append(Data, new_col, axis = 1)
        
    return Data

# The function to delete a number of columns starting from an index
def deleter(Data, index, times):
    
    for i in range(1, times + 1):
    
        Data = np.delete(Data, index, axis = 1)
        
    return Data
    
# The function to delete a number of rows from the beginning
def jump(Data, jump):
    
    Data = Data[jump:, ]
    
    return Data

# Example of adding 3 empty columns to an array
my_ohlc_array = adder(my_ohlc_array, 3)

# Example of deleting the 2 columns after the column indexed at 3
my_ohlc_array = deleter(my_ohlc_array, 3, 2)

# Example of deleting the first 20 rows
my_ohlc_array = jump(my_ohlc_array, 20)

# Remember, OHLC is an abbreviation of Open, High, Low, and Close and it refers to the standard historical data file

And now, we can go through by using the below function to create the Vertical Horizontal Filter.

def vertical_horizontal_indicator(Data, lookback, what, where):
    
    # Adding a few columns
    Data = adder(Data, 10)
    
    for i in range(len(Data)):
        
        Data[i, where] = Data[i, what] - Data[i - 1, what]
    
    Data = jump(Data, 1)    
       
    Data[:, where] = abs(Data[:, where])for i in range(len(Data)):
        
        Data[i, where + 1] = Data[i - lookback + 1:i + 1, where].sum()
    
    for i in range(len(Data)):
        
        try:
            
            Data[i, where + 2] = max(Data[i - lookback + 1:i + 1, what]) - min(Data[i - lookback + 1:i + 1, what])
        
        except ValueError:
            
            pass
        
    Data = jump(Data, lookback)    
    
    Data[:, where + 3] = Data[:, where + 2] / Data[:, where + 1]
    
    Data = deleter(Data, where, 3)
    
    return Data

The issue however is that it is not really used for trading nor is it clear how it is used to follow the trend. The idea of the indicator is that rising values represent a trending market (Bullish or bearish) while falling values represent a ranging market, but we need to find our own thresholds and limits.

**EURUSD hourly values with the 60-period Vertical Horizontal Filter.**

The above chart shows the hourly EURUSD with the 60-period Vertical Horizontal Filter. On average, we can notice that rising values of the indicator correspond to a trending market and therefore, we can probably form a type of mean that follows the indicator’s values and derive hypothetical interpretations from the cross such as the below:

Whenever the indicator is below its moving average, the market’s regime is unclear / ranging.
Whenever the indicator is above its moving average, the market’s regime is trending.

**EURUSD hourly values with the 60-period Vertical Horizontal Filter and its 60-period moving average.**

The above chart features the addition of a 60-period moving average. If we want to apply the conditions stated before, we can create the following signal function that inputs 1’s in a separate column for trending markets.

def signal(Data, indicator, indicator_ma, signal):
    
    Data = adder(Data, 10)
        
    for i in range(len(Data)):
            
        if Data[i, indicator] > Data[i, indicator_ma]:
               
            Data[i, signal] = 1
                           
    return Data

**EURUSD hourly values with the short-term market regime detection.**

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