Investing Research Articles

With stock portfolio construction increasingly based on “black box” machine learning models with very large numbers of inputs, how can investors decide whether portfolio recommendations make sense? In their November 2023 paper entitled “The Anatomy of Machine Learning-Based Portfolio Performance”, Philippe Coulombe, David Rapach, Christian Montes Schütte and Sander Schwenk-Nebbe describe a way to use… Keep Reading

Do different proxies for investor disagreement widely used as stock return predictors (analyst forecast dispersion, idiosyncratic volatility and trading volume) generally agree? In their November 2023 paper entitled “Disagreement of Disagreement”, Christian Goulding, Campbell Harvey and Hrvoje Kurtović examine relationships among these three types of investor disagreement and propose a non-linear composite of them. They… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/4/23 through 12/8/23. 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.

“Simplest Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy Update” updates performance of a strategy that each month holds SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) or iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT) depending on which has the higher total return over the last three months, including a direct comparison to a portfolio that each month allocates 50% to Simple Asset Class ETF Value… Keep Reading

Should investors consider portfolio volatility when choosing allocations to stocks and bonds in their retirement accounts? In his October 2023 paper entitled “Retirement Planning: The Volatility-Adjusted Coverage Ratio”, Javier Estrada introduces volatility-adjusted coverage ratio (VAC) as an alternative retirement portfolio metric. He defines this metric as coverage ratio (C, number of years of withdrawals supported… Keep Reading

The Conference Board “publishes leading, coincident, and lagging indexes designed to signal peaks and troughs in the business cycle for major economies around the world,” including the widely cited Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the U.S. Does LEI predict stock market behavior? Using the as-released monthly change in LEI from archived Conference Board press releases… Keep Reading

Are broad measures of public sociopolitical sentiment relevant to investors? Do they predict stock returns as indicators of exuberance and fear? To investigate, we relate S&P 500 Index return and 12-month trailing S&P 500 price-operating earnings ratio (P/E) to the percentage of respondents saying “yes” to the recurring Gallup polling question: “In general, are you… Keep Reading

Is there an exploitable way to find which stocks lead and which stocks lag in returns? In their October 2023 paper entitled “Detecting Lead-Lag Relationships in Stock Returns and Portfolio Strategies”, Álvaro Cartea, Mihai Cucuringu and Qi Jin test three ways to measure and exploit linear and non-linear lead-lag relationships in individual stock returns via… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 11/27/23 through 12/1/23. 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.

Can the large language model GPT-4 help investors make investment decisions? In their October 2023 paper entitled “Can ChatGPT Assist in Picking Stocks?”, Matthias Pelster and Joel Val conduct a live test during the 2023 second quarter earnings announcements of the value and timeliness of investment advice from GPT-4 augmented with WebChatGPT for internet access…. Keep Reading