May 26, 2011 Sentiment Indicators
Does construction of new tallest-in-the-world buildings indicate financial hubris and therefore pending equity market weakness? In the March 2011 version of his paper entitled “Tower Building and Stock Market Returns”, Gunter Löffler relates construction of...
May 23, 2011 Fundamental Valuation, Size Effect, Value Premium
Are some firms more at risk of creative destruction by new technologies? If so, does the market offer a premium to investors in such firms? In his March 2011 paper entitled “Creative Destruction and Asset...
May 20, 2011 Fundamental Valuation, Size Effect, Value Premium
Are value stocks priced low because the companies are in financial distress? In their May 2011 paper entitled “Is the Value Premium Really a Compensation for Distress Risk?”, Wilma de Groot and Joop Huij investigate...
May 18, 2011 Economic Indicators, Momentum Investing, Size Effect
Does the size effect vary in a predictable way? In the May 2011 version of his paper entitled “Explaining the Dynamics of the Size Premium”, Valeriy Zakamulin investigates relationships between eight market/economic variables and the...
May 17, 2011 Individual Investing
How effective are tax-deferred savings in avoiding federal income taxes over a lifetime? In their May 2011 paper entitled “The Tax Benefit of Income Smoothing”, Kristian Rydqvist, Steven Schwartz and Joshua Spizman estimate the lifetime...
May 16, 2011 Technical Trading
The typical long-term moving average used for technical analysis is 200 trading days. Do moving averages measured over even longer intervals have value? In the December 2010 version of their paper entitled “Technical Analysis with...
May 11, 2011 Mutual/Hedge Funds
Are many mutual fund managers worldwide so fixated on benchmarks that they substantially emulate index funds, while charging shareholders “active” fees? In the April 2011 version of their paper entitled “The Mutual Fund Industry Worldwide:...
May 10, 2011 Big Ideas, Fundamental Valuation, Technical Trading
Can investors systematically benefit from the perspective that trading is the exchange of one asset for another, not the buying and selling of a single asset? In his paper entitled “Optimal Rotational Strategies Using Combined...
May 6, 2011 Economic Indicators, Fundamental Valuation
The Fed Model relates the aggregate earnings yield (E/P) of the stock market to Treasury bond or bill yields under the assumption that investors view equities and government bonds as competing ways to achieve yield....
May 4, 2011 Momentum Investing
When implemented via exchange-traded funds (ETF), does an equity sector momentum strategy beat an equity style momentum strategy? How do these approaches compare to a geographic equity momentum strategy? In his paper entitled “Optimal Momentum”,...
May 3, 2011 Big Ideas
Trading rules that generate clustered signals present capital allocation problems. Sometimes unpredictable scarcity of signals idles capital, and other times unpredictable clustering of signals presents too many opportunities to exploit. Portfolio-level performance therefore falls considerably...
May 2, 2011 Equity Options
Does the market compensate buyers of illiquid options? In their March 2011 paper entitled “Illiquidity Premia in the Equity Options Market”, Peter Christoffersen, Ruslan Goyenko, Kris Jacobs and Mehdi Karoui investigate the impact of illiquidity...
April 29, 2011 Individual Gurus
Eddie Kwong of TradingMarkets.com requested a review of Larry Connors’ Daily Battle Plan (Battle Plan). TradingMarkets.com presents the Battle Plan service as “a reliable guide for short term traders looking to take advantage of the...
April 26, 2011 Sentiment Indicators
Is there evidence of investor herding in the variation of return correlations for individual stocks? In their January 2011 paper entitled “Asymmetric Correlations”, Tarun Chordia, Amit Goyal and Qing Tong investigate when and why return...
April 25, 2011 Mutual/Hedge Funds
Hedge fund databases are prone to: (1) self-selection bias (only good performers report); (2) backfill bias (only funds with good recent past performance retroactively report it); (3) survivorship bias (exclusion of dead fund performance); and;...
April 21, 2011 Big Ideas
In his 2011 book Super Boom: Why the Dow Will Hit 38,820 and How You Can Profit from It, author Jeffrey Hirsch (editor-in-chief of the Stock Trader’s Almanac) states, regarding the book’s title and a...
April 21, 2011 Fundamental Valuation
Does the earnings yield (inverse of price-to-earnings ratio, or E/P) usefully predict returns for individual stocks? In their April 2011 paper entitled “Reexamination of the Earnings-Price Anomaly by the Buy-Sell Strategy”, Hsin-Yi Yu and Li-Wen...
April 20, 2011 Big Ideas, Size Effect, Value Premium, Volatility Effects
Can portfolios exhibit properties not evident from, or even contrary to, average properties of their component assets? In the April 2011 draft of their paper entitled “The Sources of Portfolio Returns: Underlying Stock Returns and...
April 19, 2011 Mutual/Hedge Funds
...investors may want to consider all these fees, expenses and costs debited from fund assets as evidence of fund manager emphasis on outcomes other than maximizing net return.
April 19, 2011 Momentum Investing, Technical Trading
“The Industry 52-week High Effect” summarizes findings that the 52-week high effect, the future outperformance (underperformance) of stocks currently near their respective 52-week highs (lows), is stronger and more consistent for 20 industries than for...
April 18, 2011 Momentum Investing, Technical Trading
Are 52-week highs and lows useful equity price momentum indicators at the industry level? In their March 2011 paper entitled “Industry Information and the 52-Week High Effect”, Xin Hong, Bradford Jordan and Mark Liu compare...
April 14, 2011 Equity Options
Can investors exploit greed among naive traders by selling them the most lottery-like equity options? In the March 2011 version of their paper entitled “Stock Options as Lotteries”, Brian Boyer and Keith Vorkink investigate the...
April 13, 2011 Fundamental Valuation
Is the accruals anomaly still on solid ground? In their paper entitled “The Accrual Anomaly”, Patricia Dechow, Natalya Khimich, and Richard Sloan review the origin of and subsequent research on the accruals anomaly. They characterize...
April 12, 2011 Equity Options, Volatility Effects
Are options for volatile stocks overpriced? In the September 2010 version of their paper entitled “Cross-Section of Option Returns and Stock Volatility”, Jie Cao and Bing Han investigate the relationship between option return and price...
April 8, 2011 Investing Expertise, Mutual/Hedge Funds
Can investors discriminate between lucky and skillful equity fund managers by examining the distribution of returns across fund holdings? In the September 2010 preliminary draft of their paper entitled “Home-Run Sluggers vs. Contact Hitters: Stock...