Investing Research Articles

Do stock return anomalies weaken after discovery? If so, why? In the February 2016 update of their paper entitled “Does Academic Research Destroy Stock Return Predictability?”, David McLean and Jeffrey Pontiff examine out-of-sample and post-publication performance of 97 predictors of the cross section of stock returns published in peer-reviewed finance, accounting and economics journals. For each predictor, published confidence in… Keep Reading

Can stop-loss rules solve the stock momentum crash problem? In the September 2016 update of their paper entitled “Taming Momentum Crashes: A Simple Stop-loss Strategy”, Yufeng Han, Guofu Zhou and Yingzi Zhu test the effectiveness of a somewhat complex stop-loss rule in limiting the downside risk of a stock momentum strategy. Each month, they rank stocks into… Keep Reading

Does the stock market perform poorly in a deflationary environment? In the September 2016 version of his paper entitled “Deflation and Stock Prices”, Michael Clemens explores relationships between change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and each of stock market return and stock market valuation. He defines four deflation/inflation regimes based on ranges of annualized average monthly… Keep Reading

Does identification of trends in the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) via simple moving averages (SMA) support effective timing of the U.S. stock market or VIX futures exchange-traded notes (ETN)? to investigate we consider timing four asset pairs: SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) – ProShares Short S&P500 (SH) since SH inception on 6/21/06. SPY – iShares 1-3… Keep Reading

Is the term structure of CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) futures useful for timing the underlying stock index? In the February 2012 version of his paper entitled “The Relationship between VIX Futures Term Structure and S&P500 Returns”, Athanasios Fassas relates the VIX futures term structure to both contemporaneous and future S&P500 Index returns. He measures the VIX futures term structure as the… Keep Reading

Can traders exploit a tendency of some investors to over-anticipate good or bad news just before firm earnings announcements? In their 2016 paper entitled “Fear and Greed: a Returns-Based Trading Strategy around Earnings Announcements”, flagged by a subscriber, Ivo Jansen and Andrei Nikiforov investigate post-release reversal of extreme abnormal returns during the week before an earnings announcement. Specifically, they test a trading… Keep Reading

How do the long and short sides of futures trend-following strategies differently affect portfolio riskiness? In their September 2016 paper entitled “The Long and Short of Trend Followers”, Jarkko Peltomaki, Joakim Agerback and Tor Gudmundsen-Sinclair investigate via linear regression behaviors of the long and short sides of commonly used trend-following strategies across equities, bonds, commodities and currency futures/forwards… Keep Reading

Does trading by expert investors boost performance (profitably exploit information), or depress performance (unprofitably exploit information or wastefully churn on noise)? In their September 2016 paper entitled “Trading Frequency and Fund Performance”, Jeffrey Busse, Lin Tong, Qing Tong and Zhe Zhang investigate the relationship between trading frequency and performance among institutional investors (funds). They specify fund daily trading frequency as number of trades… Keep Reading

Is there a straightforward way to incorporate current business/economic climate into equity market valuation ratios? In their September 2016 paper entitled “Generalized Financial Ratios to Predict the Monthly Equity Market Premium”, Andres Algaba and Kris Boudt introduce and test a generalized price-dividend ratio (GDPR) that takes into account recent business and discount rate conditions, as follows: Where P is equity market… Keep Reading

What is the single best performance metric an investor can use to rank performances of competing portfolios (such as mutual funds)? In his September 2016 paper entitled “Measuring Portfolio Performance: Sharpe, Alpha, or the Geometric Mean?”, Moshe Levy compares Sharpe ratio, 5-factor (market, size, book-to-market, profitability, investment) alpha and geometric mean return as portfolio performance metric. The… Keep Reading