Investing Research Articles

Should investors look for consistent predictability, or upside surprises, in quarterly earnings announcements? In his November 2009 paper entitled “Meeting Analyst Forecasts and Stock Returns”, Ioan Mirciov investigates relationships between announced earnings (relative to analyst forecasts) and long-run future stock performance. Using earnings forecasts, actual earnings, stock returns and firm characteristics data for a broad… Keep Reading

…relatively inexperienced investors should find Fire Your Stock Analyst! a useful guide for analyzing U.S. stocks. However, the book presents no benchmarks for investing performance and does not support diversification across asset classes.

…evidence from a limited sample period (in terms of number of bull and bear markets) indicates that optimized leverage beats both fixed leverage and no leverage. However, with unlucky initial conditions, even optimized leverage may underperform no leverage over a period of many years.

As suggested by a reader, we evaluate here stock market forecasts of John Buckingham, Chief Investment Officer of Al Frank Asset Management, who emphasizes careful stock selection, broad diversification and a long investing horizon. He is editor of the Prudent Speculator and author of The Buckingham Report (as much promotional as informative). The few forecasts… Keep Reading

…evidence suggests that investors may be able to predict which SEOs will engender the most pronounced subsequent market underperformance by measuring the level of surprise in the SEO announcement.

Reasons why it is likely unproductive to attempt to rank firm characteristics or factors according to predictive power for future stock returns, or strategies according to modeled alpha, include…

…investors may be able to generate substantial average abnormal returns by systematically taking short (long) positions in stocks of firms with extremely bad (good) quarterly earnings for several months after respective earnings announcements.

…empirical analysis indicates that ignoring hedge fund withdrawal restrictions may result in material overestimation of the benefits of including hedge funds in a portfolio.

…evidence from narrow portfolios (top 30 stocks) over a recent short test period indicate that GARP-value-size strategies perform well, with the magic formula (EBIT/EV and ROC combined), EBIT/EV alone and E/P alone excelling.

“…many investors have been lured into the idea that shorting a pair of leveraged ETFs is a sure gain.”