Recent Investing Research

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/16/25 through 6/20/25. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list.

“Invest with the Fed?” finds that indexes based on the Invest With the Fed (IFED) stock selection strategy beat reasonable benchmarks. How does that finding translate to investable assets? To investigate, we look at performances since inception of two exchange-traded note (ETN) offerings: ETRACS IFED Invest with the Fed TR Index ETN (IFED), with SPDR… Keep Reading

Are low volatility stock strategies, as implemented by exchange-traded funds (ETF), attractive? To investigate, we consider eight of the largest low volatility ETFs, all currently available, in order of longest to shortest available histories: Invesco S&P 500 Low Volatility Portfolio (SPLV) – the 100 stocks from the S&P 500 Index with the lowest realized volatility over the… Keep Reading

How does the performance of the U.S. stock market compare to that of the aggregated stock markets in the rest of the world over the long run? Is there alternating leadership? To investigate, we use the S&P 500 Index (SP500) as a proxy for the U.S. stock market and the World ex USA Index in… Keep Reading

Do funds based on holdings/trades of members of the U.S. Congress and their families beat the market? To investigate, we look at performances of two recently introduced exchange-traded funds (ETF): Unusual Whales Subversive Democratic Trading ETF (NANC) – invests primarily in stocks held by Democratic members of Congress and/or their families per public disclosure filings…. Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/9/25 through 6/13/25. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list.

How well do the short-term stock picks of publicly available artificial intelligence (AI) platforms perform? To investigate, we asked Grok, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Meta AI the following questions on April 20, 2025: Please succinctly provide your unique best long idea for the next 30 days. Please succinctly provide your unique best shorting idea for… Keep Reading

Should investors, particularly those employing machine learning, prefer complex or simple prediction models? In the May 2025 revision of his paper entitled “Simplified: A Closer Look at the Virtue of Complexity in Return Prediction”, Daniel Buncic challenges prior research finding that portfolio performance (Sharpe ratio) increases with machine learning model complexity when the number of… Keep Reading

The Inflation Forecast now incorporates actual total and core Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for May 2025. The actual total (core) inflation rate is lower than (lower than) forecasted.

What are current estimates of equity risk premiums (ERP) and risk-free rates around the world? In their May 2025 paper entitled “Survey: Market Risk Premium and Risk-Free Rate Used for 54 countries in 2025”, Pablo Fernandez, Diego Garcia and Lucia Acin summarize results of an April 2025 email survey of international finance and economic professors,… Keep Reading