Investing Research Articles

The Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) each month picks winners based on total return over a specified ranking (lookback) interval from the following eight asset class exchange-traded funds (ETF), plus cash: PowerShares DB Commodity Index Tracking (DBC) iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index (EEM) iShares MSCI EAFE Index (EFA) SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) iShares Russell 2000… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 7/8/19 through 7/12/19. 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.

…evidence from simple tests on a limited data set suggests that investors using monthly simple moving averages to time the stock market should prefer (avoid) a calculation cycle anchored just after (a few days before) month ends.

Can investors beat a typical active U.S. equity mutual fund via a small portfolio of periodically re-weighted equity exchange-traded funds (ETF)? In their February 2019 paper entitled “Are Passive Funds Really Superior Investments: An Investor Perspective”, flagged by a subscriber, Edwin Elton, Martin Gruber and Andre de Souza: Determine via cluster analysis a small set… Keep Reading

How reliable and variable are the most widely accepted long-short factor premiums across asset classes? Can investors time factor premium? In their June 2019 paper entitled “Factor Premia and Factor Timing: A Century of Evidence”, Antti Ilmanen, Ronen Israel, Tobias Moskowitz, Ashwin Thapar and Franklin Wang examine multi-class robustness of and variation in four prominent… Keep Reading

Is there a common optimal set of ranking (lookback) interval, holding interval, weighting scheme and skip-month rule for long-short stock momentum strategies across European country markets? In her May 2019 paper entitled “Are Momentum Strategies Profitable? Recent Evidence from European Markets”, Anastasia Slabchenko identifies optimal parameter sets from 576 long-short stock momentum strategy variations in… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 7/1/19 through 7/5/19. 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.

Do sentiment indexes usefully predict U.S. stock market returns? In his May 2018 doctoral thesis entitled “Forecasting Market Direction with Sentiment Indices”, flagged by a subscriber, David Mascio tests whether the following five sentiment indexes predict next-month S&P 500 Index performance: Investor Sentiment – the Baker-Wurgler Index, which combines six sentiment proxies. Improved Investor Sentiment… Keep Reading

Does duration (relative arrival sequence) of firm cash flows explain many widely accepted equity factor returns? In their April 2019 paper entitled “Duration-Driven Returns”, Niels Gormsen and Eben Lazarus investigate whether firm cash flow duration explains value, profitability, investment, low risk, idiosyncratic volatility and payout factor returns. They measure cash flow duration monthly via multiple… Keep Reading

…evidence from simple tests indicates that quarterly change in productivity is of no use to investors as a standalone indicator for predicting stock market behavior.