Hi, welcome to the lesson where we’ll take a deeper look at four academic papers and see how we can code up Alpha factors from them. In building the material for this lesson, I browsed dozens of academic papers and chose some of these to implement. Note, that I didn’t choose these papers particularly because they produced great Alphas, rather, I chose them to give a diversity of style and show important techniques and building blocks for making Alphas. In fact, some of the performance is disappointing in the period we test, but the concepts that you’ll learn are key to the work that you may do as a quant. I’ll discuss each of these papers and we’ll see how each can be implemented in code. I will also comment on instances where I take a practitioner’s approach to interpreting or generalizing ideas from the academic research. In reading these papers and learning to implement Alpha factors based on their ideas, you will learn about Alpha factor building blocks that we’ll refer to as overnight returns, accelerated and decelerated gains or losses, positive skew, and idiosyncratic volatility. You’ll gain insights into how psychology and market mechanics shape the hypotheses upon which these factors were built, and also see different ways in which a factor can condition the effect of another factor. I hope that you can develop a good habit of reading academic research, proposing, and implementing, and then evaluating potential Alpha factors. These skills and experiences will serve you well in preparing you for roles in quantitative finance. Let’s get started.