I'm planning to pursue a phd in trading strategies, was thinking of systematic trading strategies or pairs trading, does anybody have some ideas or pointers?Would appreciate some ideas

Could be a difficult topic. What is the department (and school, if you don't mind)?What type of (novel) thing do you expect to show? p.s. I will add that there is an art to framing your topic in an academically acceptable way.For example, let's say your real interest is trading and market-making. You dissertationtopic could be"Hidden Markov Models for Order Book Transitions",

No school yet, it's really the brainstorming stage, the asset class gonna be Equities

we crossed posts -- see my edit for one topic

Thx a mln Alan for your reply,I'm actually interested in idea of creating a trading strategy model, is there something interesting towards that area??

I don't know. As a practical matter, it's extremely difficult to come up with things that potentially mightdo better (on a risk-adjusted basis) than a buy-and-hold default. Paper trading ideas are not a good topic, IMO. The people who read your admissions application are generally going to have the same opinion. That's why finding an academically acceptable topic is perhaps more important than you realize. You might do better to search for professors that are publishing equity-related research that looks interesting to you,see if they have PhD students, and what were the dissertation topics in the past.

You don't mention what academic field of study you are considering, and I think this may play an important role. In finance, trading strategies tend not to be the primary focus, but are more likely to be considered as part of empirical work to test a hypothesis. E.g., you theorize that some market is slow to process a certain kind of information, or that some particular cognitive bias will cause a type of price pattern. If there is statistical support for your theory, you may then proceed to see if it is economically (in addition to statistically) significant, which can be done by devising trading strategies that seek to profit from the theory. The obvious problems with all such research programs are that it is really hard not to build in hindsight bias as well as the fact that one in twenty randomly chosen strategies would be expected to be profitable on a 95% confidence level, and for all the developments in the behavioral finance literature over the last couple of decades, most finance academics will have an intuitive bias in favor or market efficiency. If you consider studying statistics or signal processing (including machine learning, pattern recognition, etc.) you will probably run into fewer philosophical walls, but your advisors may not be particularly interested in or knowledgable about the stock market.

Thx so much for all the help, that's very useful,Would you think something more precise like pairs trading or market neutral are more like then, or no?

I haven come across any phd in trading, but these topics are not new and quite simple. I think we should explore on more methods to employ a strategy, like when cointegration is high then use pair trading,

Thx for all help,May be I should go for a market neutral strategy with positive alpha for example