Investing Research Articles

Do Morningstar’s analyst ratings predict which mutual funds will do best? In their January 2014 paper entitled “Going for Gold: An Analysis of Morningstar Analyst Ratings”, Will Armstrong, Egemen Genc and Marno Verbeek examine the performance of mutual funds after Morningstar assigns analyst ratings to them. Morningstar initiated these substantially qualitative ratings (Gold, Silver, Bronze,… Keep Reading

Does the utilities sector exhibit a useful lead-lag relationship with the broad stock market? In their January 2014 paper entitled “An Intermarket Approach to Beta Rotation: The Strategy, Signal and Power of Utilities”, Charles Bilello and Michael Gayed test a simple strategy that holds either the U.S. utilities sector or the broad U.S. stock market based… Keep Reading

Do active investment managers beat the market? In their January 2014 paper entitled “Active Manager Performance: Alpha and Persistence”, Frank Benham and Edmund Walsh assess the performance of active investment managers relative to appropriate benchmarks across asset classes over long periods. They consider six basic investment classes: core bonds; high-yield bonds; domestic large capitalization stocks; domestic small capitalization… Keep Reading

Do professional analysts systematically miss target prices for individual stocks? In the November 2013 draft of their paper entitled “Understanding and Predicting Target Price Valuation Errors”, Patricia Dechow and Haifeng You measure the errors in returns implied by professional stock analyst consensus price targets and examine the sources of these errors. They further investigate whether investors can… Keep Reading

How do professional analysts value stocks? In their March 2014 paper entitled “Peering Inside the Analyst ‘Black Box’: How Do Equity Analysts Model Companies?”, Andreas Markou and Simon Taylor examine the private stock valuation models of a group of analysts working in research departments of large investment banks. They examine both modeling methods and inputs…. Keep Reading

How big is the return premium associated with stock illiquidity? In his March 2014 paper entitled “The Pricing of the Illiquidity Factor’s Systematic Risk”, Yakov Amihud specifies and measures an illiquidity premium. He defines illiquidity as the average daily ratio of absolute return to dollar volume over the past three months. He specifies the illiquidity… Keep Reading

What is the best way to generate price trend signals for trading futures/forward contracts? In their December 2013 paper entitled “CTAs – Which Trend is Your Friend?”, Fabian Dori, Manuel Krieger, Urs Schubiger and Daniel Torgler compare risk-adjusted performances of three ways of translating trends into trading signals: Binary signals (up or down) trigger 100%… Keep Reading

How well do long-short stock strategies work, after accounting for all costs? In their February 2014 paper entitled “Assessing the Cost of Accounting-Based Long-Short Trades: Should You Invest a Billion Dollars in an Academic Strategy?”, William Beaver, Maureen McNichols and Richard Price examine the net attractiveness of several long-short strategies as stand-alone investments (as for… Keep Reading

Does the expanding set of exchange-traded funds (ETF) support reliable replication (cloning) of future hedge fund returns? In their March 2014 paper entitled “In Search of Missing Risk Factors: Hedge Fund Return Replication with ETFs”, Jun Duanmu, Yongjia Li and Alexey Malakhov investigate the use of ETFs as factors in constructing hedge fund clones. They… Keep Reading

Can the best traders reliably exploit the ex-dividend effect (the tendency for dividend-paying stocks to fall by less than the dividend amount after paying the dividend)? In their March 2014 paper entitled “Ex-Dividend Profitability and Institutional Trading Skill”, Tyler Henry and Jennifer Koski examine whether highly skilled traders bearing very low transaction costs (some institutions)… Keep Reading