Investing Research Articles

A subscriber suggested looking at the S&P 500 price-to-sales ratio (P/S) as an indicator for timing the U.S. stock market. To investigate, we relate P/S and change in P/S to S&P 500 Index (SP500) returns, as follows: Conduct lead-lag analyses for quarterly P/S versus quarterly SP500 returns, and for quarterly change in P/S versus SP500… Keep Reading

“A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation” is a highly influential paper (over 253,000 downloads from SSRN) about asset allocation based on trend following, with the original version posted in early 2007 and a revision in early 2013. The strategy in that paper applies a 10-month simple moving average (SMA10) timing rule separately to each… Keep Reading

How should investors reposition portfolios across inflationary regimes (deflation, low inflation, mild inflation, high inflation)? In their July 2022, paper entitled “Investing in Deflation, Inflation, and Stagflation Regimes”, Guido Baltussen, Laurens Swinkels and Pim van Vliet examine asset class and factor returns across inflationary regimes. They first construct long monthly return histories for asset classes… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 7/11/22 through 7/15/22. 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.

Over at least the past three decades, 100% or more of the return (0% or negative return) on a wide range of risky assets occurs when markets are closed (open). Is this overnight effect important to investors? In their June 2022 paper entitled “Night Moves: Is the Overnight Drift the Grandmother of All Market Anomalies”,… Keep Reading

Multifactor funds offer rules-based, diversified exposures to firm/stock factors found to beat the market in academic studies. Do the funds beat the market in real life? In his June 2022 paper entitled “Multifactor Funds: An Early (Bearish) Assessment”, Javier Estrada assesses performance of such funds across U.S., global and emerging markets relative to that of… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 7/5/22 through 7/8/22. 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 the choices researchers make when constructing factor portfolios to explain stock returns materially affect their findings? In their June 2022 paper entitled “Mind Your Sorts”, Amar Soebhag, Bart van Vliet and Patrick Verwijmeren examine the extent to which such construction choices affect factor performance. They consider 11 distinct long-short factors as used in widely… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked whether the Turn-of-the-Month (TOTM) effect applies to currencies. To investigate, as in the past, we define TOTM as the interval from the close five trading days before to the close four trading days after the last trading day of the month (a total of eight trading days, centered on the monthly close)…. Keep Reading

A subscriber asked about the relationship between the high-yield bond spread and stock market return, with focus on when the latter is entering a bear market. To investigate, we use the ICE BofA US High Yield Index Option-Adjusted Spread (HY Spread) as a proxy for the high-yield bond spread and SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust… Keep Reading