Investing Research Articles

A reader asked whether the gold-gold miner stocks arbitrage-like argument in Jay Kaeppel’s February 2010 article “Don’t Give Up On Gold Stocks Just Yet” (for which his September 2004 article “Gold Stock and Gold Bullion” is a more robust antecedent) supports frequent timing of these assets. For example, if SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) and Market Vectors Gold… Keep Reading

How good can factor investing get? In his May 2016 paper entitled “Quantitative Style Investing”, Mike Dickson examines strategies that: Aggregate return forecasting power of four or six theoretically-motivated stock factors (or characteristics) via monthly multivariate regressions. Use inception-to-date simple averages of regression coefficients, starting after the first 60 months and updating annually, to suppress estimation and sampling error. Create… Keep Reading

How hard is it to beat equal weighting in constructing a portfolio of attractive common stocks? In his May 2016 paper entitled “Naive Diversification Isn’t so Naive after All”, Mike Dickson compares performances of 15 portfolio construction methods applied to eight portfolios of stocks with high expected returns. Construction methods include equal weighting, two versions of minimum volatility,… Keep Reading

…evidence from several tests offers mixed support for a belief that the intermediate-term strength/weakness of “risky” stock indexes relative to a “conservative” index generates reliably profitable trading signals. Strength/weakness of the NASDAQ Composite Index relative to the S&P 500 Index may have merit for market timing.

Are any trading strategy backtest performance statistics predictive of out-of-sample results? In their March 2016 paper entitled “All that Glitters Is Not Gold: Comparing Backtest and Out-of-Sample Performance on a Large Cohort of Trading Algorithms”, Thomas Wiecki, Andrew Campbell, Justin Lent and Jessica Stauth compare backtest and out-of-sample performance statistics for 888 algorithmic trading strategies. They first screen a… Keep Reading

How does stock pairs trading performance interact with lagged pair correlation and volatility? In her May 2016 paper entitled “Demystifying Pairs Trading: The Role of Volatility and Correlation”, Stephanie Riedinger investigates how stock pair correlation and summed volatilities influence pair selection, pair return and portfolio return. Her baseline is a conventional pairs trading method that each month: (1)… Keep Reading

Does the U.S. stock market volatility risk premium (VRP), measured as the difference between the volatility implied by stock index option prices recent actual index volatility, usefully predict stock market returns? To investigate, we consider a simple VRP specification: S&P 500 Implied Volatility Index (VIX) minus standard deviation of daily S&P 500 Index returns over the past 21 trading days…. Keep Reading

Subscribers have proposed that asset class momentum effects should accelerate (shorter optimal ranking interval) when markets are in turmoil (bear market/high volatility). “Asset Class Momentum Faster During Bear Markets?” addresses this hypothesis in a multi-class, relative momentum environment. Another approach is to evaluate the relationship between time series (intrinsic or absolute) momentum and volatility. Applied to the S&P… Keep Reading

Do peaks in the S&P 500 Implied Volatility Index (VIX) signal positive abnormal U.S. stock market returns? If so, can investors exploit these returns? In the May 2016 version of his paper entitled “Abnormal Stock Market Returns Around Peaks in VIX: The Evidence of Investor Overreaction?”, Valeriy Zakamulin analyzes U.S. stock market returns around VIX peaks. He employs… Keep Reading

Do asset price series in general reliably exhibit trends and reversals? In his May 2016 paper entitled “Trend, Mean-Reversion or Random Walk? A Statistical Analysis of Price Behavior in Major Markets”, Theo Athanasiadis tests a wide variety of financial market price series for existence of significant trends and reversals. He considers both spot and futures price series in U.S…. Keep Reading