Investing Research Articles

Are the widely used Fama-French three-factor model (market, size, book-to-market ratio) and the Carhart four-factor model (adding momentum) the best factor models of stock returns? In their September 2014 paper entitled “Digesting Anomalies: An Investment Approach”, Kewei Hou, Chen Xue and Lu Zhang construct the q-factor model comprised of market, size, investment and profitability factors and test its ability to predict… Keep Reading

Does the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) make predictions useful to investors? In his October 2014 paper entitled “CAPM: an Absurd Model”, Pablo Fernandez argues that the assumptions and predictions of CAPM have no basis in the real world. A key implication of CAPM for investors is that an asset’s expected return relates positively to its expected beta… Keep Reading

Can the U.S. stock market continue to deliver its historical return? In the preliminary draft of his paper entitled “A Pragmatist’s Guide to Long-run Equity Returns, Market Valuation, and the CAPE”, John Golob poses two questions: What long-run real return should investors expect from U.S. equities? Do popular metrics reliably indicate when the U.S. equity market is… Keep Reading

How much distortion can data snooping inject into expected investment strategy performance? In their October 2014 paper entitled “Statistical Overfitting and Backtest Performance”, David Bailey, Stephanie Ger, Marcos Lopez de Prado, Alexander Sim and Kesheng Wu note that powerful computers let researchers test an extremely large number of model variations on a given set of data, thereby inducing extreme overfitting. In finance,… Keep Reading

What’s the latest research on portfolio construction and risk management? In the the introduction to the July 2014 version of his (book-length) paper entitled “Many Risks, One (Optimal) Portfolio”, Cristian Homescu states: “The main focus of this paper is to analyze how to obtain a portfolio which provides above average returns while remaining robust to most risk… Keep Reading

A reader inquired about the validity of Martin Zweig’s Four Percent Model, which states (from pages 93-94 of the 1994 version of Martin Zweig’s Winning on Wall Street): “The Four Percent Model for the stock market works as follows. First, It uses the Value Line Composite Index…an unweighted price index of approximately seventeen hundred stocks…… Keep Reading

Do U.S. television events that draw large attentive audiences have an effect on the stock prices of main corporate sponsors? In the September 2014 version of his paper entitled “Investor Attention and Stock Prices: Evidence from a Natural Experiment”, Erik Mayer investigates whether main sponsorship of NCAA Division I college football bowl games affects sponsor stock prices during… Keep Reading

In the preface to his 2015 book entitled Dual Momentum Investing: An Innovative Strategy for Higher Returns with Lower Risk, author Gary Antonacci states: “We need a way to earn long-term above-market returns while limiting our downside exposure. This book shows how momentum investing can make that desirable outcome a reality. …the academic community now accepts momentum as the… Keep Reading

How do commodity futures behave in the post-financialization era, with commodities easily accessible via exchange-traded instruments and futures? In their September 2014 paper entitled “Factor Structure in Commodity Futures Return and Volatility”, Peter Christoffersen, Asger Lunde and Kasper Olesen analyze commodity return and volatility dynamics since financialization (after deregulation of commodity markets in the early 2000s). They consider 15 contract series… Keep Reading

Is there a simple way to tell whether a commodity is overvalued or undervalued? In his May 2014 presentation package entitled “Commodity ‘CAPE Ratios’”, Claude Erb looks at long-term real commodity prices as valuation “crutches” to estimate when commodities are overvalued and undervalued. He provides examples relating real commodity prices to future long-term (10-year) real commodity returns. He… Keep Reading