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Koijen, Moskowitz, Pedersen & Vrugt define a portable, model-free carry measure across FX, bonds, commodities and equities. Plain-language intro. Not investment advice.
Takeaway. Carry is the return you would earn if prices stayed unchanged (income / roll / basis style components)—and the same idea travels across FX, bonds, commodities, and equities.
Carry (Ralph Koijen, Tobias Moskowitz, Lasse Pedersen, Evert Vrugt, NBER/JFE lineage culminating ~2018) is the portable “yield-if-spot-unchanged” factor recipe after-work quants keep meeting.
Fit for learners: Model-free carry across FX, bonds, commodities, equity—another portable factor recipe.
This Hub note is a plain-language intro. Not investment advice. Compare with Betting Against Beta.
“Carry trade” often means FX only in blogs. Desks actually want one concept that works for futures curves, bond yields, dividend futures, etc.—without rewriting economics every asset class.
Educational pattern only—do not treat average carry premia as guaranteed.
Carry forces you to read a term structure or income field carefully: futures prices by expiry, yields, dividend forecasts. That data hygiene is pure Python practice.
Tiny evening exercise: download or invent two futures expiries; compute a simple roll-yield / carry proxy; rank two toy contracts—print which is “higher carry” under your definition—learning only.
Landing: NBER w19325
Not investment advice. This Hub note is educational only. The carry paper is research—not permission to run FX or futures carry with real capital.
Single course CTA: SoloQuant Academy’s Introduction to Python Programming—get solid with files and plots; then futures-curve notebooks become readable.