A subscriber asked about an update of “Simplest Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy?”, which each month holds SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) or iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT) depending on which has the...
Does commercial and industrial (C&I) credit fuel business growth and thereby drive the stock market? To investigate, we relate changes in credit standards from the Federal Reserve Board’s quarterly Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank...
Do recent daily returns for a stock reliably predict its near-term performance? In their January 2026 paper entitled “A Unified Framework for Anomalies based on Daily Returns”, Nusret Cakici, Christian Fieberg, Gabor Neszveda, Robert Bianchi...
Do “great stock picks” from Forbes beat the market? To investigate, we evaluate stock picks for 2022, 2023, 2024 and via “10 Great Stock Picks for 2022 from Top-Performing Fund Managers”, “20 Great Stock Ideas...
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/20/26 through 1/23/26. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
Each year in December, Barron’s publishes its list of the best 10 stocks for the next year. Do these picks on average beat the market? To investigate, we scrape the web to find these lists...
Having been trained by humans on human information, do Large Language Models (LLM) behave like human investors? In their January 2026 paper entitled “Artificially Biased Intelligence: Does AI Think Like a Human Investor?”, Javad Keshavarz,...
Have we entered an era when only the biggest firms can afford the massive investments needed to field hot, globally scalable technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence)? To investigate, we ask Grok to identify the 10 largest...
Past research relating U.S. stock market returns to the party holding the Presidency mostly concludes that Democratic presidents are better for the stock market than Republican presidents. However, Presidents share power conferred by the electorate...
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/12/26 through 1/16/26. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
“Exploiting the Presidential Cycle and Party in Power” summarizes strategies that hold small stocks (large stocks or bonds) when Democrats (Republicans) hold the U.S. presidency. How has this strategy performed in recent years? To investigate,...
How do exchange-traded-funds (ETF) focused on development of robotics-artificial intelligence (AI), an arguably hot area of technology, perform? To investigate, we consider eight of the largest such ETFs, all currently available, as follows: Robo Global...
The full-year Trading Calendar indicates that the U.S. stock market has three phases over the calendar year, corresponding to calendar year trading days 1-84 (January-April), 85-210 (May-October) and 211-252 (November-December). What are typical stock market...
Does lack of critical assessment of cause and effect undermine reliability of findings in scientific research? In his December 2025 presentation package entitled “Investment Lessons from Cosmology: Draw Your Assumptions Before Your Conclusions”, Marcos Lopez...
Time-series momentum (TSMOM) is a well-documented finding that past returns predict next-period returns for many asset types. Is the relationship between past and future performance linear? In their December 2025 paper entitled “Nonlinear Time Series...
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/5/26 through 1/9/26. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
A Securities Information Processor (SIP) aggregates quotes and trades from all U.S. stock exchanges to feed the NYSE Trade and Quote (TAQ) database, used in much finance research to (for example) estimate effective bid-ask spreads...
Most researchers use classical statistical testing, with a t-statistic of 2.0 as the significance threshold for accepting an hypothesis. However, this threshold is valid only if the associated p-value derives from a single test. There...
How sensitive are multi-class asset allocation strategies to variations in backtesting choices? In their December 2025 paper entitled “The Multiverse Across Asset Classes: Design Uncertainty in Asset Allocations”, Arnaud Battistella, Jean-Charles Bertrand, Guillaume Coqueret and...
Is Bitcoin a scarce, valuable asset or a Ponzi scheme? In his December 2025 paper entitled “The Great Bitcoin Debate: Saylor’s Maximalism Versus Schiff’s Monetary Traditionalism”, David Krause examines the debate between Bitcoin maximalists (represented...
“Dominant U.S. Stock Market?” summarizes a paper that (1) examines whether a 60%+ allocation to the U.S. in the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) is crazy high and (2) decides maybe not. In “How...
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/29/25 through 1/2/26. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
As of November 2025, the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) allocates about 65% to U.S. stocks. Is this allocation to a single country crazy high? In the November 2025 revision of their brief paper...
Can investors holding gold as inflation hedge/equity crash protection improve performance of this position by holding gold (silver) when the gold-to-silver ratio is relatively low (high)? To investigate, we track the ratio of SPDR Gold...
What criteria do individual investors use when deciding which stocks to acquire? In their December 2025 paper entitled “How Investors Pick Stocks: Global Evidence from 1,540 AI-Driven Field Interviews”, Byoung-Hyoun Hwang, Don Noh and Sean...