Recent Investing Research

The home page, Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) and Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy (SACEVS) now show preliminary positions for February 2026. SACEMS rankings are not very close, but markets are volatile. SACEVS allocations are unlikely to change by the close.

One concern about simple momentum strategies is data snooping bias impounded in selection of the lookback interval(s) used to measure asset momentum. To circumvent this concern, we consider the following argument: The CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) broadly indicates the level of financial markets distress and thereby the tendency of investors to act complacently (when VIX… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked about an update of “Simplest Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy?”, which each month holds SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) or iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT) depending on which has the higher total return over the last three months, including a direct comparison to a portfolio that each month allocates 50%… Keep Reading

Does commercial and industrial (C&I) credit fuel business growth and thereby drive the stock market? To investigate, we relate changes in credit standards from the Federal Reserve Board’s quarterly Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices to future U.S. stock market returns. Presumably, loosening (tightening) of credit standards is good (bad) for stocks. The… Keep Reading

Do recent daily returns for a stock reliably predict its near-term performance? In their January 2026 paper entitled “A Unified Framework for Anomalies based on Daily Returns”, Nusret Cakici, Christian Fieberg, Gabor Neszveda, Robert Bianchi and Adam Zaremba relate the distribution of last-month (21 trading days) daily returns to next-month return without imposing functional forms,… Keep Reading

Do “great stock picks” from Forbes beat the market? To investigate, we evaluate stock picks for 2022, 2023, 2024 and via  “10 Great Stock Picks for 2022 from Top-Performing Fund Managers”, “20 Great Stock Ideas for 2023 from Top-Performing Fund Managers”, “10 Best Stocks For 2024” and “The Best Stocks To Buy Now For 2026”…. Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/20/26 through 1/23/26. 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.

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 2026, calculate the associated calendar year total return for each stock and calculate the average return… Keep Reading

Having been trained by humans on human information, do Large Language Models (LLM) behave like human investors? In their January 2026 paper entitled “Artificially Biased Intelligence: Does AI Think Like a Human Investor?”, Javad Keshavarz, Cayman Seagraves and Stace Sirmans investigate whether 48 widely used LLMs exhibit any of 11 known cognitive biases in financial… Keep Reading

Have we entered an era when only the biggest firms can afford the massive investments needed to field hot, globally scalable technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence)? To investigate, we ask Grok to identify the 10 largest NASDAQ firms by market capitalization (Big 10) over the last 10 years. We then compare annual average next-year total returns… Keep Reading