Investing Research Articles

How should investors think about, and perhaps exploit, asset return volatility? In his December 2022 paper entitled “A Stylized History of Volatility”, Emanuel Derman reviews how generations of financial modelers have quantified volatility and ultimately created tradable volatility-based assets. He also discusses some general modeling considerations. Based on the body of research and his experience,… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked about an assertion that bitcoin (BTC) price trend/return predicts return of the S&P 500 Index (SP500). To investigate, we relate BTC returns to SP500 returns at daily, weekly and monthly frequencies. We rationalize the different trading schedules for these two series by excluding BTC trading dates that are not also SP500 trading… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked about the performance of a strategy that each month allocates funds to pairs of exchange-traded fund (ETF) asset class proxies according to the term spread, as measured by the difference in yields between the 10-Year constant maturity U.S. Treasury note and the 3-Month U.S. Treasury bill (T-bill). Specifically: When the term spread is… Keep Reading

Do the widely used U.S. stock return factors exhibit long-term trend changes and shorter-term cyclic behaviors? In his November 2022 paper entitled “Trends and Cycles of Style Factors in the 20th and 21st Centuries”, Andrew Ang applies various methods to compare trends and cycles for equity value, size, quality, momentum and low volatility factors, with… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/27/22 through 12/30/22. 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 stocks that are winners or losers over multiple lookback intervals generate stronger future returns because they attract wider audiences of momentum investors? In their June 2022 paper entitled “Overlapping Momentum Portfolios”, Iván Blanco, Miguel De Jesus and Alvaro Remesal explore this question by comparing performances of three portfolios: MOM (benchmark): long (short) the value-weighted… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/19/22 through 12/23/22. 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.

A subscriber requested evaluation of a strategy that seeks to exploit U.S stock market reversion after dips by temporarily applying margin. Specifically, the strategy: At all times holds the U.S. stock market. When the stock market closes down more than 7% from its high over the past year, augments stock market holdings by applying 50%… Keep Reading

In response to a prior analysis (updated here), a subscriber asked whether adding a simple moving average (SMA) filter to “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” (SACEMS) assets, either before or after ranking them based on past returns, improves strategy performance. SACEMS each month picks winners from among the a set of eight asset class… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/12/22 through 12/16/22. 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.