Investing Research Articles

Is the concept of emergent social behaviors useful in investing and trading? In his January 2020 address to the American Finance Association entitled “Social Transmission Bias in Economics and Finance”, David Hirshleifer discusses social economics and finance, a new field that examines how social processes shape economic and financial behaviors. This field is distinct from:… Keep Reading

Does the value premium for U.S. stocks, as measured by book-to-market ratio, persist after its initial discovery/publication in 1992? In their January 2020 paper entitled “The Value Premium”, Eugene Fama and Kenneth French assess whether the value premium in the U.S. declines or disappears in a post-publication sample that is as long as the discovery… Keep Reading

As implied in “Mirror Image Seasonality for Stocks and Treasuries?”, are bonds better than stocks during the “Sell-in-May” months of May through October? Are behaviors of government, corporate investment grade and corporate high-yield bonds over this interval similar? To investigate, we test seasonal behaviors of: SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) Vanguard Intermediate-Term Treasury (VFITX) Fidelity Investment Grade… Keep Reading

Are firms that engage the public via Twitter more expanding (via exposure) or shrinking (via adverse social media frenzy) their opportunity sets? In their January 2020 paper entitled “The Social Media Risk Premium”, Amin Hosseini, Gergana Jostova, Alexander Philipov and Robert Savickas investigate relationships between firm Twitter activity and stock return. Their data include firm… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 2/24/20 through 2/28/20. 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.

“Monthly Rebalanced Shorting of Leveraged ETF Pairs” finds that shorting some pairs of leveraged ETFs may be attractive. How has the strategy worked recently and how sensitive are findings to execution costs? To investigate, we consider three pairs of monthly reset equal short positions in: ProShares Ultra S&P500 (SSO) and ProShares UltraShort S&P500 (SDS) ProShares… Keep Reading

How does execution delay affect the performance of the Best Value and Weighted versions of the “Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy” (SACEVS)? These strategies each month allocate funds to the following asset class exchange-traded funds (ETF) according to valuations of term, credit and equity risk premiums, or to cash if no premiums are undervalued: 3-month Treasury bills (Cash) iShares… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 2/18/20 through 2/21/20. 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 verification of findings in “Smart Money Indicator for Stocks vs. Bonds”, where the Smart Money Indicator (SMI) is a complicated variable that exploits differences in futures and options positions in the S&P 500 Index, U.S. Treasury bonds and 10-year U.S. Treasury notes between institutional investors (smart money) and retail investors (dumb money)…. Keep Reading

Do investors systematically and exploitably underreact to deviations in firm fundamentals from recent averages? In their January 2020 paper entitled “Anchoring on Past Fundamentals”, Doron Avramov, Guy Kaplanski and Avanidhar Subrahmanyam investigate how deviations of quarterly firm accounting variables from averages over recent quarters relate to future returns across stocks. They first construct a stock… Keep Reading