Investing Research Articles

How strong is investor herding with respect to friends, family and co-workers? In their June 2014 paper entitled “Peer Effects, Personal Characteristics and Asset Allocation”, Annie Zhang, Ben Jacobsen and Ben Marshall examine the roles of personal characteristics (age, gender, wealth and tax rate), peer influence (household, neighbors and coworkers), and financial advice in individual investor asset class allocations and switching decisions. Their… Keep Reading

“Mutual Fund Hot Hand Performance” tests a “hot hand” strategy that each year picks the top performer from the Vanguard family of diversified equity mutual funds (not including sector funds) and holds that winner the next year. A subscriber suggested a robustness test using the Fidelity family of diversified equity mutual funds. To support the test, we select all Fidelity… Keep Reading

Is there some tractable investment performance metric that corrects weaknesses commonly encountered in financial markets research? In the July 2014 version of their paper entitled “The Deflated Sharpe Ratio: Correcting for Selection Bias, Backtest Overfitting and Non-Normality”, David Bailey and Marcos Lopez de Prado introduce the Deflated Sharpe Ratio (DSR) as a tool for evaluating investment… Keep Reading

How do hedge funds electing not to report to a commercial database differ from those that do? In their July 2014 paper entitled “What Happens ‘Before the Birth’ and ‘After the Death’ of a Hedge Fund?”, Vikas Agarwal, Vyacheslav Fos and Wei Jiang compare performances of equity hedge funds before they begin self-reporting, while they are self-reporting;… Keep Reading

Should investors believe that they can usefully time the stock market? If so, how big might “usefully” be? In their July 2014 paper entitled “Can Individual Investors Time Bubbles?”, Jussi Keppo, Tyler Shumway and Daniel Weagley investigate persistence in the ability of individual Finnish investors to time the stock market, with focus on timing of two bubbles/crashes. They measure… Keep Reading

Are the sources of active mutual fund risk mostly common (systematic) or unique (idiosyncratic)? In his July 2014 paper entitled “Components of Portfolio Variance: R2, SelectionShare and TimingShare”, Anders Ekholm decomposes mutual fund return variance (risk) into three sources: (1) passive systematic factor exposure (R-squared); (2) active security selection or stock picking (SelectionShare); and, (3) active systematic factor… Keep Reading

Is there some better predictor of long-term stock market return than the widely cited cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio (P/E10 or CAPE)? In the July 2014 version of his paper entitled “Forecasting Equity Returns: An Analysis of Macro vs. Micro Earnings and an Introduction of a Composite Valuation Model”, Stephen Jones compares how well several fundamental and economic factors predict real long-term (10-year)… Keep Reading

Do the behaviors of the most widely accepted stock market factors (size, book-to-market or value, and momentum) vary with the economic trend? In the June 2014 version of their paper entitled “Macroeconomic Determinants of Cyclical Variations in Value, Size and Momentum premium in the UK”, Golam Sarwar, Cesario Mateus and Natasa Todorovic examine differences in the sensitivities of UK equity market size,… Keep Reading

Can investors exploit monthly persistence in the value premium for U.S. stocks? In his February 2014 paper entitled “Exploiting Factor Autocorrelation to Improve Risk Adjusted Returns”, Kevin Oversby investigates whether investors can exploit the fact that the Fama-French model high-minus-low (HML) value factor exhibits positive monthly autocorrelation (persistence). The HML factor derives from the difference in performance between portfolios of… Keep Reading

Are Morningstar’s Ultimate Stock-Pickers good stock pickers? In his June 2014 paper entitled “Using Random Portfolios to Evaluate the Performance of the Ultimate Stock-Pickers Index”, Stefaan Pauwels compares the quarterly volatility-adjusted performances of the Morningstar Ultimate Stock-Pickers (USP) top buys, top holdings and top sells to those of many randomly generated (zero-skill) portfolios. Morningstar specifies USP members as fund… Keep Reading