Investing Research Articles

How should investors approach commodity futures trading? In her August 2016 paper entitled “An Introduction to U.S. Commodity Futures Markets: a Historical Perspective Along with Commodity Trading Principles”, Hilary Till summarizes success factors for designing and managing a commodity futures portfolio, including: identifying potential trades; constructing trades; constructing a portfolio of trades; risk management; payoff expectations; level of… Keep Reading

Do measures of investor attention to specific firms/stocks indicate how the stocks react to earnings surprises? In their July 2016 paper entitled “Yahoo Finance Search and Earnings Announcements”, Alastair Lawrence, James Ryans,  Estelle Sun and Nikolay Laptev investigate the interaction of investor attention and earnings surprises. They focus on abnormal Yahoo Finance search activity as the measure of attention…. Keep Reading

How does pairs trading of relatively diversified exchange-traded funds (ETF) compare with pairs trading of individual stocks? In his July 2016 paper entitled “Does Pairs Trading with ETFs Work?”, Philipp Doering tests a common pairs trading process on the universe of ETFs. Specifically, he: Each month, scales all ETF prices to $1 and computes the sum of squared price… Keep Reading

How can investors integrate global asset class diversification, pre-eminent factor premiums and crash protection? In his July 2016 paper entitled “The Trinity Portfolio: A Long-Term Investing Framework Engineered for Simplicity, Safety, and Outperformance”, Mebane Faber summarizes a portfolio combining these three principles, as follows: Global diversification: Include U.S. stocks, non-U.S. developed markets stocks, emerging markets stocks, corporate bonds, 30-year U.S…. Keep Reading

Is there some stock value metric that is markedly superior to the conventional book-to-market ratio (BM) for identifying undervalued and overvalued stocks? In his July 2016 paper entitled “Value Investing with Dividend-to-Market Ratio”, Yiqing Dai tests the effectiveness of maximum payable dividend ratio (DM) ) as an alternative to book-to-market ratio for value investing. He specifies DM as… Keep Reading

“Central Bank Gold Reserves, Gold Lending and Gold Price” finds some conditional relationships between aggregate world central bank gold reserves and gold price. Can investors exploit these relationships? To check, we relate recent quarterly estimates of central bank gold reserves and quarterly spot gold price, noting that there is roughly a one quarter delay in… Keep Reading

Do central banks predictably influence the price of gold? In the July 2016 revision of his paper entitled “Central Banks and Gold”, Dirk Baur examines interactions of central bank gold reserves, gold carry trade profitability and gold price. Using monthly data for central bank gold reserves and gold prices since 1968 and for 1-month and 6-month gold lease… Keep Reading

As summarized in “Twisting Buffett’s Preferred Stocks-bonds Allocation”: (1) Warren Buffett’s preferred fixed asset allocation of 90% stocks and 10% short‐term government bonds (90-10), rebalanced annually, is sensible for U.S. markets; and, (2) investors may be able to beat this allocation modestly by adding simple annual dynamics. Are findings similar internationally? In his July 2016 paper entitled “Global Asset Allocation in Retirement:… Keep Reading

Is recent weakness in the stock return momentum anomaly, perhaps representing market adaptation to widespread anomaly exploitation, permanent or transitory? In their July 2016 paper entitled “Where Has the Trend Gone? An Update on Momentum Returns in the U.S. Stock Market”, Steven Dolvin and Bryan Foltice explore recent profitability of stock return momentum trading in the U.S. market. They… Keep Reading

Do global equity market behaviors support the hypothesis that intermediate-term momentum drives stock prices beyond fundamental values, thereafter driving long-term reversion? In their June 2016 paper entitled “Overreaction and the Cross-Section of Returns: International Evidence”, Douglas Blackburn and Nusret Cakici investigate whether long-term reversion is evident in global equity markets allocated to four regions: North America, Europe, Japan and Asia. They define long-term… Keep Reading