Investing Research Articles

A subscriber suggested that the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI) may be a useful U.S. stock market predictor. NFCI “provides a comprehensive weekly update on U.S. financial conditions in money markets, debt and equity markets, and the traditional and ‘shadow’ banking systems.” It consists of 105 inputs, including the S&P 500 Implied… Keep Reading

Are there equity styles that tend to perform relatively well during and after stock market crashes? In their April 2020 paper entitled “Equity Styles and the Spanish Flu”, Guido Baltussen and Pim van Vliet examine equity style returns around the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919 and five earlier deep U.S. stock market corrections (-20% to… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/11/20 through 5/15/20. 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.

How should investors think about combining strategies into a broader portfolio that reliably exploits their interactions over time? In the March 2020 version of his paper entitled “Preferred Portfolios: An Improved Blueprint to Construct Multi Strategy Portfolios”, Lars Kestner discusses how to combine individual strategies into a portfolio that performs robustly out-of-sample base on five… Keep Reading

How should investors think about maximum drawdown (MaxDD) as a portfolio/strategy performance metric? In their April 2020 paper entitled “Drawdowns”, Otto Van Hemert, Mark Ganz, Campbell Harvey, Sandy Rattray, Eva Martin and Darrel Yawitch examine usefulness of MaxDD for portfolio/strategy performance evaluation. They first quantify how MaxDD relates to key return statistics based on 100,000… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/3/20 through 5/8/20. 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 anomaly portfolios that are long (short) the tenth, or decile, of stocks with the highest (lowest) expected value-weighted returns based on some firm accounting variable or stock behavior really work on a net basis? In the May 2019 version of their paper entitled “Shorting Costs and Profitability of Long-Short Strategies”, Dongcheol Kim and Byeung… Keep Reading

Why do recent studies find that the value premium declines over time? In their April 2020 paper entitled “The Fundamental-to-Market Ratio and the Value Premium Decline”, Andrei Gonçalves and Gregory Leonard investigate whether book value (book equity, BE) is a good proxy for actual fundamental value (fundamental equity, FE). They measure FE for each firm… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 4/27/20 through 5/1/20. 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 a decade of underperformance by some widely followed stock value strategies mean it is time to throw in the towel? In their March 2020 paper entitled “Is (Systematic) Value Investing Dead?”, Ronen Israel, Kristoffer Laursen and Scott Richardson assess the value of (near-term, say two years) fundamental information as a driver of stock returns… Keep Reading