Recent Investing Research

The full-year Trading Calendar indicates that the U.S. stock market has three phases over the calendar year, corresponding to calendar year trading days 1-84 (January-April), 85-210 (May-October) and 211-252 (November-December). What are typical stock market returns and return variabilities for these phases? Using daily S&P 500 Index closes from the end of December 1927 through… Keep Reading

“Exploiting the Presidential Cycle and Party in Power” summarizes strategies that hold small stocks (large stock or bonds) when Democrats (Republicans) hold the U.S. presidency. How has this strategy performed in recent years? To investigate, we consider three strategy alternatives using exchange-traded funds (ETF): D-IWM:R-SPY: hold iShares Russell 2000 (IWM) when Democrats hold the presidency and SPDR… Keep Reading

The Inflation Forecast now incorporates actual total and core Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for December 2024. The actual total (core) inflation rate is slightly higher than (slightly lower than) forecasted.

Each year in December, Barron’s publishes its list of the best 10 stocks for the next year. Do these picks on average beat the market? To investigate, we scrape the web to find these lists for years 2011 through 2024, calculate the associated calendar year total return for each stock and calculate the average return… Keep Reading

Can a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model, such as ChatGPT 4o, materially aid investors in understanding the implications of earnings conference call transcripts? In their December 2024 paper entitled “AI, Investment Decisions, and Inequality”, Alex Kim, David Kim, Maximilian Muhn, Valeri Nikolaev and Eric So conduct two surveys to explore how generative AI shapes investment… Keep Reading

Which price-to-earnings ratio is best for screening stocks? In the November 2024 first version of his paper entitled “Forward Price-Earnings Ratio”, Luca Conrads compares the practical abilities of seven price-to-earnings ratios to predict S&P 500 returns (see the chart below for four of these seven): Conventional price-to-earnings (PE) – current price divided by prior-year actual… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/6/25 through 1/10/25. 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.

Data snooping bias entails the capture of noise in a dataset that is lucky with respect to a research goal, such as high Sharpe ratio for an investment/trading strategy. Snooping may involve discovery via multiple tests of a lucky subsample in a time series, a lucky parameter value in a model or a lucky alternative… Keep Reading

Can large language models (LLMs) create financial research? In their December 2024 paper entitled “AI-Powered (Finance) Scholarship”, Robert Novy-Marx and Mihail Velikov describe a process for automatically generating academic finance papers using LLMs and demonstrates its efficacy by producing hundreds of complete papers on stock return predictability. Specifically, they: Identify 31,460 potential stock return predictors… Keep Reading

Are there “trigger” words in risk sections of annual U.S. firm 10-K reports that materially influence buying and selling of associated stocks? In his December 2024 paper entitled “Risky Words and Returns”, Sina Seyfi tests a way to predict stock returns by analyzing the text of risk disclosures in respective firm 10-K reports. Specifically, he… Keep Reading