Investing Research Articles

Are many mutual fund managers worldwide so fixated on benchmarks that they substantially emulate index funds, while charging shareholders “active” fees? In the April 2011 version of their paper entitled “The Mutual Fund Industry Worldwide: Explicit and Closet Indexing, Fees, and Performance”, Martijn Cremers, Miguel Ferreira, Pedro Matos and Laura Starks address the prevalence and… Keep Reading

Can investors systematically benefit from the perspective that trading is the exchange of one asset for another, not the buying and selling of a single asset? In his paper entitled “Optimal Rotational Strategies Using Combined Technical and Fundamental Analysis”, third-place winner for the 2011 Wagner Award presented by the National Association of Active Investment Managers,… Keep Reading

The Fed Model relates the aggregate earnings yield (E/P) of the stock market to Treasury bond or bill yields under the assumption that investors view equities and government bonds as competing ways to achieve yield. Might supply (company management), rather than demand (investors), more precisely drive the relationship between E/P and interest rates? In the… Keep Reading

When implemented via exchange-traded funds (ETF), does an equity sector momentum strategy beat an equity style momentum strategy? How do these approaches compare to a geographic equity momentum strategy? In his paper entitled “Optimal Momentum”, runner-up for the 2011 Wagner Award presented by the National Association of Active Investment Managers, Gary Antonacci uses ETFs to… Keep Reading

Trading rules that generate clustered signals present capital allocation problems. Sometimes unpredictable scarcity of signals idles capital, and other times unpredictable clustering of signals presents too many opportunities to exploit. Portfolio-level performance therefore falls considerably short of trade-level promise. Are there ways to optimize capital allocation for such trading rules? In his paper entitled “Buying… Keep Reading

Does the market compensate buyers of illiquid options? In their March 2011 paper entitled “Illiquidity Premia in the Equity Options Market”, Peter Christoffersen, Ruslan Goyenko, Kris Jacobs and Mehdi Karoui investigate the impact of illiquidity of equity options and underlying stocks on option returns. They consider two option expiration horizons, short-term (20 to 70 days)… Keep Reading

Eddie Kwong of TradingMarkets.com requested a review of Larry Connors’ Daily Battle Plan (Battle Plan). TradingMarkets.com presents the Battle Plan service as “a reliable guide for short term traders looking to take advantage of the surge in interest in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with “a record of more than 80% correct trades. …Larry and his research… Keep Reading

Is there evidence of investor herding in the variation of return correlations for individual stocks? In their January 2011 paper entitled “Asymmetric Correlations”, Tarun Chordia, Amit Goyal and Qing Tong investigate when and why return correlations for individual stocks vary over time. At the end of each month, they calculate average pairwise correlations of stocks… Keep Reading

Hedge fund databases are prone to: (1) self-selection bias (only good performers report); (2) backfill bias (only funds with good recent past performance retroactively report it); (3) survivorship bias (exclusion of dead fund performance); and; (4) liquidation bias (poor performers stop reporting but continue to operate for some period). Do hedge fund indexes therefore inaccurately… Keep Reading

In his 2011 book Super Boom: Why the Dow Will Hit 38,820 and How You Can Profit from It, author Jeffrey Hirsch (editor-in-chief of the Stock Trader’s Almanac) states, regarding the book’s title and a target date of 2025: “…I believe it will happen” and more cautiously “the coming super boom is not only plausible,… Keep Reading