<p><em>This article examines an equity pairs trading strategy using daily, weekly and monthly European share price data over the period 1998 – 2007. The authors show that when stocks are matched into pairs with minimum distance between normalised historical prices, a simple trading rule based on volatility between these prices yields annualised raw returns of up to 15% for the weekly data frequency. Bootstrap results suggest returns from the strategy are attributable to skill rather than luck, while insignificant beta coefficients provide evidence that this is a market neutral strategy. Resistance of the strategy’s returns to reversal factors suggest pairs trading is fundamentally different to previously documented reversal strategies based on concepts such as mean reversion.</em><em></em></p>
European Equity Pairs Trading: The Effect of Data Frequency on Risk and Return
