Investing Research Articles

Should investors rely on aggregate positions of speculators (large non-commercial traders) as indicators of expected futures market returns? In their November 2018 paper entitled “Speculative Pressure”, John Hua Fan, Adrian Fernandez-Perez, Ana-Maria Fuertes and Joëlle Miffre investigate speculative pressure (net positions of speculators) as a predictor of futures contract prices across four asset classes (commodity, currency, equity index and… Keep Reading

Do non-profit endowments beat the market with their investments? In their November 2018 paper entitled “Investment Returns and Distribution Policies of Non-Profit Endowment Funds”, Sandeep Dahiya and David Yermack estimate investment returns and distribution rates for a broad and unbiased (not self-reported or self-selected) sample of U.S. non-profit endowment funds. Using annual IRS Form 990 filings for 28,696 organizations… Keep Reading

Are premium toys attractive alternative investments? In their April 2018 paper entitled “LEGO – The Toy of Smart Investors”, Victoria Dobrynskaya and Julia Kishilova study LEGO sets as an alternative investment. A secondary market for these sets with 10,000+ daily transactions, affordable to any retail investor, has evolved since 2000. Brickpicker.com tracks prices for each set (either new… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/17/18 through 12/21/18. 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 accounting for realistic trading frictions support beliefs that equity index out-of-the money (OTM) put options and at-the-money (ATM) straddles are systematically overpriced? In their October 2018 paper entitled “Index Option Anomalies: How Real Are They?”, Michal Czerwonko and Stylianos Perrakis re-examine assumptions and data used in several high-profile studies finding that OTM put options and ATM straddles… Keep Reading

Do prices of commodity futures contract series reliably exhibit reversal and/or momentum? In their October 2018 paper entitled “Do Momentum and Reversal Strategies Work in Commodity Futures? A Comprehensive Study”, Andrew Urquhart and Hanxiong Zhang investigate the performance of four momentum/reversal trading strategies as applied to excess return indexes for 29 commodity futures contract series. Excess return indexes… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/10/18 through 12/14/18. 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.

As a follow-up to “Sunspot Cycle and Stock Market Returns” a reader asked: “Sunspot activity does have a direct relationship to weather. Could one speculate on the agriculture market using the sunspot cycle?” To investigate, we relate sunspot activity to the fairly long U.S. Producer Price Index (PPI) for grains. Using monthly averages of daily sunspot counts and… Keep Reading

A reader asked whether Charles Nenner, self-described as “the talk of Wall Street since accurately predicting some of the biggest moves in the Markets over the past few years,” accurately forecasts equity and commodity markets. We consider the following: In his July 2007 discussion of the “Nenner Methodology at the Bloomberg Studio”, Charles Nenner cites sunspot… Keep Reading

Is there a flip side of cyclic relative weakness to the cyclic relative strength described in “Pervasive 12-Month (and 5-Day) Relative Strength Cycles?”? In their October 2018 paper entitled “Seasonal Reversals in Expected Stock Returns”, Matti Keloharju,Juhani Linnainmaa and Peter Nyberg test whether cyclic weakness (seasonal reversal) balances the cyclic strength (seasonality) effect. For example, if a stock… Keep Reading