Investing Research Articles

…hidden gems (unlike hidden lumps of coal) generally do not want to be hidden. The best small firms solicit analyst coverage to get investor attention.

…the empirical foundation for value investing may not be as sound as generally thought.

…if you want to make money following the retail investor herd, you have to get in and out within weeks. For longer-term outperformance, bet against the herd.

Guru Grades ranks a group of 29 stock market experts according to our assessments of the accuracy of their stock market forecasts. Since Jason Kelly has been at or near the top of the list, we asked him to encapsulate his thinking on stock market timing in a short piece for this blog. What makes… Keep Reading

In case you are sick of hearing about the January effect…

…the advertising of financial firms seeks to tap investor sentiment, a lagging indicator of stock market action, not investor rationality. These appeals encourage trend-following rather than contrarian behavior.

…large short sellers generally know what they are doing. A rapid increase in short interest indicates abnormally low returns over the near term.

…investors everywhere have increasingly embraced modern portfolio theory, emphasizing risk management (diversification) over stock picking. The best opportunities for (diligent) stock pickers are the stocks of young, small, obscure, foreign firms.

In his 2004 autobiography, My Life as a Quant, Reflections on Physics and Finance, Emanuel Derman recounts his experiences as a physicist driven by the forces of employment supply and demand to redirect his labor toward quantitative financial analysis/strategy. Knowledge and skills critical to his transition are: a sense of how the world works, modeling… Keep Reading

Does value beat growth because: (1) investors/traders irrationally overreact to recent bad (good) news about value (growth) stocks; or, (2) they rationally recognize that value stocks are inherently more risky than growth stocks? In their March 2005 paper entitled “Value versus Growth: Movements in Economic Fundamentals”, Yuhang Xing and Lu Zhang seek to clarify the… Keep Reading