Investing Research Articles

In the prologue of their 2013 book entitled Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, authors Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton state: “When it comes to increasing the amount of money they have, most people recognize that relying on their own intuition is insufficient, spawning an entire industry of financial advisors. But when it comes to spending… Keep Reading

Does the market pay a premium to equity funds with relatively high “bad” (left tail) volatility? In their May 2013 paper entitled “Volatility vs. Tail Risk: Which One is Compensated in Equity Funds?”, James Xiong, Thomas Idzorek and Roger Ibbotson compare return premiums for conventional volatility (standard deviation of total returns) and tail risk (value-at-risk)… Keep Reading

The Federal Reserve states that open market operations regulate “the aggregate level of balances available in the banking system,” thereby keeping the effective Federal Funds Rate close to a target level. The operations are predominantly repurchases, whereby the Federal Reserve provides liquidity. Do Permanent Open Market Operations (POMO) systematically affect the nominal or real yields… Keep Reading

A reader hypothesized that the Federal Reserve uses Open Market Operations repurchases to stimulate, or prop up, the stock market. The hypothesis supposes that private parties, such as prime brokers, use the funds released by these repurchases to buy (highly leveraged) stock futures contracts, immediately attracting arbitrageurs who simultaneously short futures and purchase stock indexes…. Keep Reading

Why does the widely cited and intuitive Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) prediction that extra risk (beta) earns extra reward (rate of return) not work for stocks? In their May 2013 paper entitled “Explanations for the Volatility Effect: An Overview Based on the CAPM Assumptions”, David Blitz, Eric Falkenstein and Pim van Vliet organize research on… Keep Reading

Has crude oil turned into paper from an investment perspective? In their May 2013 paper entitled “Oil Prices, Exchange Rates and Asset Prices”, Marcel Fratzscher, Daniel Schneider and Ine Van Robays examine relationships between crude oil price and behaviors of other asset classes. Specifically, they relate spot West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price to:… Keep Reading

Do currency exchange rates exhibit short-term momentum? In the April 2013 version of their paper entitled “Is There Momentum or Reversal in Weekly Currency Returns?”, Ahmad Raza, Ben Marshall and Nuttawat Visaltanachoti investigate whether exchange rate movements over the past one to four weeks persist over the next one to four weeks. They test these… Keep Reading

Do investors demand a risk premium for divided government because of the policy uncertainty of gridlock? In the April 2013 preliminary draft of their paper entitled “Divided Governments and Asset Prices”, Elvira Sojli and Wing Wah Tham„ investigate the effect of divided government on asset prices by comparing U.S. stock market performance in years of divided… Keep Reading

Can commodities still be useful for portfolio diversification, despite their recent poor aggregate return, high volatility and elevated return correlations with other asset classes? In the May 2013 version of their paper entitled “Strategic Allocation to Commodity Factor Premiums”, David Blitz and Wilma de Groot examine the performance and diversification power of the commodity market portfolio… Keep Reading

Does adding a proxy for private equity to a diversified portfolio improve its performance? To check, we add PowerShares Global Listed Private Equity (PSP) to the following mix of asset class proxies (the same used in “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy”): PowerShares DB Commodity Index Tracking (DBC)iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index (EEM)iShares MSCI EAFE Index (EFA)SPDR Gold Shares (GLD)iShares Russell… Keep Reading