Investing Research Articles

Which equity factors have high and low expected returns? In their February 2017 paper entitled “Forecasting Factor and Smart Beta Returns (Hint: History Is Worse than Useless)”, Robert Arnott, Noah Beck and Vitali Kalesnik evaluate attractiveness of eight widely used stock factors. They measure alpha for each factor conventionally via a portfolio that is long (short)… Keep Reading

How should factor-based (style) investors proceed after picking a factor to exploit? In their September 2017 paper entitled “Craftsmanship Alpha: An Application to Style Investing”, Ronen Israel, Sarah Jiang and Adrienne Ross survey style portfolio implementation options. They start with a brief discussion of style portfolios types and then focus on portfolio design and implementation. They note trade-offs associated… Keep Reading

Is stock factor timing attractive? In their September 2016 paper entitled “Timing ‘Smart Beta’ Strategies? Of Course! Buy Low, Sell High!”, Robert Arnott, Noah Beck and Vitali Kalesnik investigate whether timing of stock factor (long-short) and smart beta (long-only) strategies is attractive. They consider eight widely used factors and eight smart beta strategies. Each factor portfolio is long (short)… Keep Reading

Does transient factor popularity drive factor/smart beta portfolio performance by pushing valuations of associated stocks up and down? In their February 2016 paper entitled “How Can ‘Smart Beta’ Go Horribly Wrong?”, Robert Arnott, Noah Beck, Vitali Kalesnik and John West examine degrees to which factor hedge portfolio and stock factor tilt (smart beta) backtests are attractive due… Keep Reading

Do broad (capitalization-weighted) stock market indexes exhibit factor tilts that may indicate concentrations in corresponding risks? In their August 2017 paper entitled “What’s in Your Benchmark? A Factor Analysis of Major Market Indexes”, Ananth Madhavan, Aleksander Sobczyk and Andrew Ang examine past and present long-only factor exposures of several popular market capitalization indexes. Their analysis involves (1) estimating the… Keep Reading

Does global diversification improve smart beta (equity factor) investing strategies? In their September 2017 paper entitled “Diversification Strikes Again: Evidence from Global Equity Factors”, Jay Binstock, Engin Kose and Michele Mazzoleni examine effects of global diversification on equity factor hedge portfolios. They consider five factors: High-Minus-low Value (HML) – book equity divided by market capitalization. Small-Minus-Big Size (SMB) – market… Keep Reading

Can investors confidently pick hedge funds that will do well? In their September 2017 paper entitled “Hedge Fund Performance Prediction”, Nicolas Bollen, Juha Joenväärä and Mikko Kauppila examine the forecasting power of 26 hedge fund performance predictors identified in past research. These predictors span five categories: seven broad manager skills; four market timing skills; six systematic risks; four tail risks;… Keep Reading

Why don’t machines rule the financial world? In his September 2017 presentation entitled “The 7 Reasons Most Machine Learning Funds Fail”, Marcos Lopez de Prado explores causes of the high failure rate of quantitative finance firms, particularly those employing machine learning. He then outlines fixes for those failure modes. Based on more than two decades of… Keep Reading

Does uncertainty about future firm earnings underlie stock factor returns? In their August 2017 paper entitled “Uncertainty, Momentum, and Profitability”, Claire Liang, Zhenyang Tang and Xiaowei Xu examine relationships between analyst uncertainty about current-year firm earnings and four U.S. stock return anomalies. They each month estimate uncertainty for each stock as square root of the average squared differences between… Keep Reading

A subscriber, noting an article on slowing down intrinsic (absolute or time series) momentum for SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) when its return volatility is relatively high, suggested doing the same for the Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS). The hypothesis is that this dynamic lookback interval approach avoids undesirable whipsaws when asset returns are… Keep Reading