Investing Research Articles

Has the growing role of financial investors in commodities markets (financialization) weakened performance of widely used momentum and term structure investing strategies? In his July 2014 paper entitled “Strategies Based on Momentum and Term Structure in Financialized Commodity Markets”, Adam Zaremba investigates impacts of financialization of commodity markets on the profitability of momentum and term structure strategies. His base momentum strategy is… Keep Reading

What is the state of cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratios (CAPE, P/E10 or Shiller PE), stock index level divided by average real earnings over the past ten years, across country equity markets worldwide? In their July 2014 paper entitled “CAPE around the World: Update 2014 – The Relationship between Risk and Return”, Joachim Klement and Oliver Dettmann update expected returns for… Keep Reading

Is risk for long-term investors different from that for short-term investors? In his July 2014 paper entitled “Rethinking Risk (II): The Size and Value Effects”, Javier Estrada examines the riskiness of small stocks versus large stocks and value (high book-to-market ratio) stocks versus growth stocks based on conventional and unconventional metrics. Each year during 1927 through 2013,… Keep Reading

Is there a best way to exploit unusual closed-end fund discounts to net asset value? In their July 2014 paper entitled “Exploiting Closed-End Fund Discounts: The Market May Be Much More Inefficient Than You Thought”, Dilip Patro, Louis Piccotti and Yangru Wu construct two regression models to predict closed-end fund returns: One model is a simple regression based on the… Keep Reading

How strong is investor herding with respect to friends, family and co-workers? In their June 2014 paper entitled “Peer Effects, Personal Characteristics and Asset Allocation”, Annie Zhang, Ben Jacobsen and Ben Marshall examine the roles of personal characteristics (age, gender, wealth and tax rate), peer influence (household, neighbors and coworkers), and financial advice in individual investor asset class allocations and switching decisions. Their… Keep Reading

“Mutual Fund Hot Hand Performance” tests a “hot hand” strategy that each year picks the top performer from the Vanguard family of diversified equity mutual funds (not including sector funds) and holds that winner the next year. A subscriber suggested a robustness test using the Fidelity family of diversified equity mutual funds. To support the test, we select all Fidelity… Keep Reading

Is there some tractable investment performance metric that corrects weaknesses commonly encountered in financial markets research? In the July 2014 version of their paper entitled “The Deflated Sharpe Ratio: Correcting for Selection Bias, Backtest Overfitting and Non-Normality”, David Bailey and Marcos Lopez de Prado introduce the Deflated Sharpe Ratio (DSR) as a tool for evaluating investment… Keep Reading

How do hedge funds electing not to report to a commercial database differ from those that do? In their July 2014 paper entitled “What Happens ‘Before the Birth’ and ‘After the Death’ of a Hedge Fund?”, Vikas Agarwal, Vyacheslav Fos and Wei Jiang compare performances of equity hedge funds before they begin self-reporting, while they are self-reporting;… Keep Reading

Should investors believe that they can usefully time the stock market? If so, how big might “usefully” be? In their July 2014 paper entitled “Can Individual Investors Time Bubbles?”, Jussi Keppo, Tyler Shumway and Daniel Weagley investigate persistence in the ability of individual Finnish investors to time the stock market, with focus on timing of two bubbles/crashes. They measure… Keep Reading

Are the sources of active mutual fund risk mostly common (systematic) or unique (idiosyncratic)? In his July 2014 paper entitled “Components of Portfolio Variance: R2, SelectionShare and TimingShare”, Anders Ekholm decomposes mutual fund return variance (risk) into three sources: (1) passive systematic factor exposure (R-squared); (2) active security selection or stock picking (SelectionShare); and, (3) active systematic factor… Keep Reading