Investing Research Articles

The quarterly CFO Survey asks chief financial officers, owner-operators, vice presidents and directors of finance, accountants, controllers, treasurers and others with financial decision-making roles in small to very large companies across all major industries to “rate optimism about the overall U.S. economy on a scale from 0 to 100.” Does the average economic sentiment of… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/22/24 through 1/26/24. 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.

In response to “Shorting VXX with Crash Protection”, which investigates shorting iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures (VXX) to capture the equity volatility risk premium, a subscriber asked about instead using a long position in ProShares Short VIX Short-Term Futures (SVXY). To investigate, we consider two scenarios based on monthly measurements: Buy and Hold –… Keep Reading

How do exchange-traded-funds (ETF) focused on development of robotics-artificial intelligence (AI), an arguably hot area of technology, perform? To investigate, we consider five of the largest such ETFs, all currently available, as follows: Robo Global Robotics and Automation Index (ROBO) ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics (ARKQ) Global X Robotics & Artificial Intelligence (BOTZ) First Trust… Keep Reading

How might Large Language Models (LLM), trained to understand, generate and interact with human language via billions or trillions of tuned parameters, impact accounting and finance? In their December 2023 paper entitled “A Scoping Review of ChatGPT Research in Accounting and Finance”, Mengming Dong, Theophanis Stratopoulos and Victor Wang synthesize recent publications and working papers… Keep Reading

“Turn-of-the-Month Effect Persistence and Robustness” indicates that average absolute returns during the turn-of-the-month (TOTM) are strong for both bull and bear markets. Does a strategy of capturing all bull market returns and TOTM returns only during bear markets perform well? To investigate, we apply four strategies to SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) as a… Keep Reading

Is the Turn-of-the-Month (TOTM) effect, a concentration of relatively strong stock market returns around the turns of calendar months, persistent over time and robust to different market conditions. Does it exist for all calendar months? Does it persist throughout the U.S. political cycle? Does it work for different equity indexes? To investigate, we define TOTM… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/16/24 through 1/19/24. 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.

Does the level of, or change in, the annual U.S. federal surplus/deficit systematically influence the U.S. stock market, perhaps by affecting consumption and thereby corporate earnings or by modifying inflation and thereby discount rates? To check, we relate annual stock market returns to the annual surplus/deficit (receipts minus outlays) as a percentage of Gross Domestic… Keep Reading

Does long term data support the belief that “as goes January, so goes the rest of the year” (January is the barometer) for the the U.S. stock market? To investigate, we consider two views of the S&P 500 Index over its full history: Correlations between index returns during each calendar month and returns over the… Keep Reading