Investing Research Articles

What conditions foretell stock momentum strategy crashes? In their October 2014 paper entitled “Momentum Trading, Return Chasing, and Predictable Crashes”, Benjamin Chabot, Eric Ghysels and Ravi Jagannathan examine stock momentum strategy performance for both widely used historical U.S. data (starting in 1926 through 2012) and for a hand-collected sample of stocks listed on the London Stock Exchange during 1866 to… Keep Reading

Do expected investment returns as predicted by experts in surveys reliably predict actual future returns? In the October 2014 version of their preliminary paper entitled “Survey Expectations of Returns and Asset Pricing Puzzles”, Ralph Koijen, Maik Schmeling and Evert Vrugt compare survey-based expected returns to actual future returns for three major asset classes encompassing: 13 country equity market indexes; 19 currencies… Keep Reading

Are gains from tax-loss harvesting, the systematic taking of capital losses to offset capital gains, additive to or subtractive from premiums from portfolio tilts toward common factors such as value, size, momentum and volatility (smart beta)? In their October 2014 paper entitled “Factor Tilts after Tax”, Lisa Goldberg and Ran Leshem look at the effects on portfolio performance… Keep Reading

Which is the better equity investment strategy: (1) a consistent portfolio tilt toward one or a few factors widely accepted, based on linear regression backtests, as effective in selecting stocks with above-average performance (smart beta); or, (2) a more complex strategy that seeks to identify stocks with above-average performance via potentially dynamic relationships with a set of many proprietary… Keep Reading

Is the market beta of a stock stable across measurement frequencies and measurement intervals? In their October 2014 paper entitled “Which Is the Right ‘Market Beta’?: 1,385 US Companies and 147 Betas/Company in a Single Date”, Jose Paulo Carelli, Pablo Fernandez, Isabel Fernandez Acín and Alberto Ortiz present calculations of 147 betas relative to the S&P 500 Index for each of the… Keep Reading

How should researchers address the issue of aggregate/cumulative data snooping bias, which derives from many researchers exploring approximately the same data over time? In the October 2014 version of their paper entitled “. . . and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns”, Campbell Harvey, Yan Liu and Heqing Zhu examine this issue with respect to studies… Keep Reading

Does compounding rules tend to improve the performance of stock-picking strategies? In the October 2014 draft of their paper entitled “Does Complexity Imply Value, AAII Value Strategies from 1963 to 2013”, Wesley Gray, Jack Vogel and Yang Xu compare 13 stock strategies labeled as “Value” by the American Association for Individual Investors (AAII) to each other and to a simple “low-price” value strategy. The… Keep Reading

Is more clearly better in terms of number of factors included in a stock screening strategy? In the October 2014 draft of their paper entitled “Incremental Variables and the Investment Opportunity Set”, Eugene Fama and Kenneth French investigate the effects of adding to an established multi-factor model of stock returns an additional factor that by itself has power to… Keep Reading

Are the widely used Fama-French three-factor model (market, size, book-to-market ratio) and the Carhart four-factor model (adding momentum) the best factor models of stock returns? In their September 2014 paper entitled “Digesting Anomalies: An Investment Approach”, Kewei Hou, Chen Xue and Lu Zhang construct the q-factor model comprised of market, size, investment and profitability factors and test its ability to predict… Keep Reading

Does the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) make predictions useful to investors? In his October 2014 paper entitled “CAPM: an Absurd Model”, Pablo Fernandez argues that the assumptions and predictions of CAPM have no basis in the real world. A key implication of CAPM for investors is that an asset’s expected return relates positively to its expected beta… Keep Reading