This thesis is constituted of three research papers and is articulated around the construction of financial crisis indicators, which produce signals, which are then applied to devise successful systematic trading strategies. The first paper deals with the establishment of a framework for the construction of our financial crisis indicators. Their predictive power is then demonstrated by using one of them to build an active protective-put strategy, which is able to beat in terms of performance a passive strategy as well as, most of the time, multiple paths of a random strategy. The second paper goes further in the application of our financial crisis indicators to the elaboration of systematic treading strategies by using the aggregated signal produce by many of our indicators to govern a portfolio constituted of a mix of cash and ETF shares, replicating an equity index like the SP500. Finally, in the third paper, we build financial crisis indicators by using a completely different approach. By studying the dynamics of the evolution of the distribution of the spreads of the components of a CDS index like the ITRAXX Europe 125, a Bollinger band is built around the empirical cumulative distribution function of the distribution of the spreads, fitted on a basis constituted of two lognormal distributions, which have been chosen beforehand. The crossing by the empirical cumulative distribution function of either the upper or lower boundary of this Bollinger band is then interpreted in terms of risk and enables us to construct a trading signal.