Recent Investing Research

A subscriber asked about the lead-lag relationship between S&P 500 earnings and S&P 500 Index returns. To investigate, we relate actual aggregate S&P 500 operating and as-reported earnings to S&P 500 Index returns at both quarterly and annual frequencies. Earnings forecasts are available well in advance of returns. Actual earnings releases for a quarter occur… Keep Reading

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

Are preferred stock strategies, as implemented by exchange-traded funds (ETF), attractive? To investigate, we consider seven of the largest preferred stock ETFs, all currently available, in order of longest to shortest available histories: Invesco Financial Preferred (PGF) – generally invests at least 90% of assets in preferred securities of financial institutions. iShares Preferred and Income… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked about current evidence that high-dividend stocks outperform the market. To investigate, we compare performances of 10  exchange-traded funds (ETFs) holding high-dividend stocks to that of SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) as a proxy for the U.S. stock market. The  high-dividend stock ETFs, from oldest to newest, are: iShares Select Dividend ETF (DVY) Invesco Dividend… Keep Reading

What is the outlook for the price of bitcoin over the next decade? In their August 2025 paper entitled “Bitcoin Supply, Demand, and Price Dynamics”, Murray Rudd and Dennis Porter model the price evolution of bitcoin based on its fixed potential supply of 21 million coins and plausible demand growth and execution behavior. Specifically, they… Keep Reading

Do AIs that incorporate audio and video (multimodal) aspects of firm/stock analysis (e.g. from YouTube), including tone, delivery style and facial expressions, distill better buy and sell recommendations from financial influencers (finfluencers) than text-only large language models (LLM)? In their May 2025 paper entitled “VideoConviction: A Multimodal Benchmark for Human Conviction and Stock Market Recommendations”,… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 9/2/25 through 9/5/25. 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.

Does bitcoin (BTC) return exhibit any exploitable leading or lagging roles with respect to gold (SPDR Gold Shares – GLD) return, change in the all-items consumer price index (CPI) or change in the effective federal funds rate (EFFR) for a monthly measurement interval? To investigate, we compute correlations between monthly BTC return and each of… Keep Reading

Is the performance of listed private equity funds (LPE) on the London Stock Exchange attractive? In their August 2025 paper entitled “What the London Stock Exchange can Teach Us About Private Equity”, Richard Ennis and Daniel Rasmussen examine LPE volatility, valuation and performance and compare findings with those based on private equity net asset values… Keep Reading

How do returns of different asset classes recently interact with the Effective Federal Funds Rate (EFFR)? We focus on monthly changes (simple differences) in EFFR  and look at lead-lag relationships between change in EFFR and returns for each of the following 10 exchange-traded fund (ETF) asset class proxies: Equities: SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) iShares Russell… Keep Reading