Investing Research Articles

The equity premium is conventionally the return on stocks minus the risk-free rate (for short-term government bills). What should be the risk-free asset for equities, arguably expected to grow in real terms and never to mature? In the November 2025 draft of their paper entitled “Purifying the Equity Premium”, Christopher Polk and Tuomo Vuolteenaho argue… Keep Reading

Is systematically selling cash-covered equity put options, as implemented by exchange-traded funds (ETF), attractive? To investigate, we consider six equity put-write ETFs, three dead and three living: US Equity High Volatility Put Write (HVPW) – oriented toward individual stocks (dead). ALPS Enhanced Put Write Strategy (PUTX) – index-oriented (dead). WisdomTree Equity Premium Income Fund (WTPI) –… Keep Reading

How is the increasing role of interacting algorithms changing financial markets? In his November 2025 paper entitled “Algorithmic Exuberance”, Marc Schmitt presents an Algorithmic Exuberance model, which automatically stimulates market volatility from two coupled feedback channels (see the figure below): Market-algorithmic reflexivity (trading systems learning from one another). Information-algorithmic reflexivity (algorithmic amplification of news, narratives… Keep Reading

How material is the rebalance timing luck (RTL) induced by picking a trading day to reform a monthly stock momentum strategy? Is there a way to manage the risk of bad luck? In their November 2025 paper entitled “The Tranching Dilemma. A Cost-Aware Approach to Mitigate Rebalance Timing Luck in Factor Portfolios”, Carlo Zarattini and… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/1/25 through 12/5/25. 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.

Can investors rely on price/return momentum as an eternal strategy foundation? In their August 2025 paper entitled “Momentum Factor Investing: Evidence and Evolution”, flagged by a subscriber, Bart van Vliet, Guido Baltussen, Sipke Dom and Milan Vidojevic review the evolution of momentum in the literature and examine momentum factor robustness over a long sample period…. Keep Reading

“Developed Country Stock Index Momentum?” summarizes a short paper finding that  MSCI developed country stock market indexes may exhibit exploitable momentum since 1970. However, indexes do not include costs of maintaining index-tracking funds, and the availability of such funds may induce market adaptation. Does the specified strategy work for exchange-traded funds (ETF) designed to track the selected… Keep Reading

Is there an easy, low-frictions way to implement an attractive momentum strategy at the country market level? In his short October 2025 paper entitled “The Lazy Man’s Momentum Strategy”, flagged by a subscriber, Javier Estrada tests a “lazy” momentum strategy that every six months at the ends of June and December: Ranks developed country stock… Keep Reading

Does bitcoin now behave like a conventional financial asset? In their short November 2025 paper entitled “From Time-Series Momentum to Size-Factor Comovement: Bitcoin’s Continuing Evolution as a Financial Asset”, Samuel Rosen and Hongcheng Wang investigate the evolution of bitcoin. Specifically, they: Perform autoregressions of weekly bitcoin returns to evaluate time-series momentum at horizons of one… Keep Reading

Can a large language model (LLM) applied to social media data catalog the strategy choices, sentiment and trading behavior of retail investors? In the November 2025 revision of their paper entitled “Wisdom or Whims? Decoding Retail Strategies with Social Media and AI”, Shuaiyu Chen, Lin Peng and Dexin Zhou apply GPT-4 Turbo and BERT to… Keep Reading