Investing Research Articles

Does the Chicago Board Options Exchange Market Volatility Index (VIX), a measure of investor expectations for stock market volatility (and arguably of current level of fearfulness), exploitably predict stock market direction? In their April 2007 paper entitled “Can the VIX Signal Market’s Direction? An Asymmetric Dynamic Strategy”, flagged by a reader, Alessandro Cipollini and Antonio Manzini investigate… Keep Reading

Do Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) act effectively as a proxy for the real estate asset class? In their June 2011 paper entitled “REITs and Underlying Real Estate Markets: Is There a Link?”, Andrey Pavlov and Susan Wachter estimate the strength of the relationship between REIT and underlying real estate returns. Specifically, they relate REIT… Keep Reading

There is a decades-long stream of academic research on equity analysts as sophisticated users of financial data, focusing on the usefulness of sell-side analyst earnings forecasts and stock recommendations. What is the gist of this stream? In his June 2011 paper entitled “Analysts’ Forecasts: What Do We Know After Decades of Work?”, Mark Bradshaw surveys… Keep Reading

Do strategies modeled using major indexes translate cleanly to the exchange-traded funds (ETF) that track them? ETF returns may deviate from underlying index levels because: (1) ETFs incorporate trading frictions from rebalancing and management fees; (2) ETF composition may differ slightly from that of the underlying index due to trading cost considerations; (3) ETFs accumulate… Keep Reading

Are there differences in implied volatilities (option pricing) between major indexes and the exchange-traded funds (ETF) that track them? In their 2011 paper entitled “The Implied Volatility of ETF and Index Options”, Stoyu Ivanov, Jeff Whitworth and Yi Zhang compare implied volatilities of SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average (DIA), SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) and PowerShares… Keep Reading

Do active exchange-traded funds (ETF), which realistically incorporate management costs and trading frictions, offer value to investors? In his June 2011 paper entitled “Active ETFs and Their Performance vis-à-vis Passive ETFs, Mutual Funds and Hedge Funds”, Panagiotis Schizas examines the returns and risks of the first active ETFs, including comparisons with alternative passive ETFs, mutual… Keep Reading

What does the body of academic research say about the stock trading behaviors and outcomes for individual investors? In their June 2011 paper entitled “The Behavior of Individual”, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean survey four areas of empirical research on the behavior of individual investors trading individual stocks: (1) performance, (2) the disposition effect, (3)… Keep Reading

A reader suggested Condor Options as a guru for review. To conduct a review, we evaluate the Condor Options Newsletter Performance table of iron condor trades (with a few hedging trades) available via the Condor Options Performance self-assessment. This table includes entry and exit dates, trade duration, specific positions/strike prices, initial value (credit), total amount… Keep Reading

Do stocks around the world tend to perform better around the time of annual earnings announcements by respective firms than during the rest of the year? In the June 2011 draft of their paper entitled “The Earnings Announcement Premium Around the Globe”, Brad Barber, Emmanuel De George, Reuven Lehavy and Brett Trueman investigate whether the… Keep Reading

Does the claim that “credit anticipates and equity confirms” support a trading strategy? In his June 2011 paper entitled “Credit-Informed Tactical Asset Allocation”, David Klein tests a stocks-cash allocation strategy that derives signals from relative valuation of the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch High Yield B index (converted to a default probability) and the Russell 2000… Keep Reading