Investing Research Articles

How should investors think about the risks and returns of music royalties, which have become transparent in the streaming era, as an asset class? In their September 2025 paper entitled “Music as an Asset Class”, Sasha Stoikov, Aadityaa Singla, Umu Cetin and Luis Alonso Cendra Villalobos test three discounted cash flow (DCF) models on transactions… Keep Reading

The Sharpe ratio is the most widely used measure of investment efficiency. Is it truly reliable? In their September 2025 paper entitled “How to Use the Sharpe Ratio”, Marcos Lopez de Prado, Alexander Lipton and Vincent Zoonekynd review the shortcomings of conventional Sharpe ratio analysis and tackle these issues via several corrections. They also address… Keep Reading

How do exchange-traded-funds (ETF) focused on supplying renewable energy perform? To investigate, we consider nine of the largest renewable energy ETFs, all currently available, as follows: iShares Global Clean Energy (ICLN) Invesco Solar (TAN) First Trust NASDAQ Clean Edge Green Energy Index (QCLN) Invesco WilderHill Clean Energy (PBW) ALPS Clean Energy (ACES) Invesco Global Clean… Keep Reading

Will bitcoin replace gold as the pre-eminent safe haven asset? In his September 2025 paper entitled “Gold and Bitcoin”, Campbell Harvey compares and contrasts bitcoin and gold as alternative safe haven assets. Based on gold and bitcoin past returns and characteristics/risks, he concludes that:

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 10/13/25 through 10/17/25. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list.

Where is gold price going? In their September 2025 paper entitled “Understanding Gold”, Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey examine the investment characteristics of gold, its reliability as a hedging asset and the reasons why gold price is currently so high. Using data for gold, inflation, U.S. Treasuries, equities, commodities, reserve bank holdings and gold exchange-traded… Keep Reading

Conventional wisdom holds that a steep yield curve (wide U.S. Treasuries term spread) is good for stocks, while a flat/inverted curve is bad. Is this wisdom correct and exploitable? To investigate, we consider in-sample tests of the relationships between several yield curve metrics and future U.S. stock market returns and two out-of-sample signal-based tests. Using… Keep Reading

Do target retirement date funds, offering glidepaths that shift asset allocations away from equities and toward bonds as target dates approach, safely generate attractive returns? To investigate, we consider seven such mutual funds offered by Vanguard, as follows: Vanguard Target Retirement 2020 Fund (VTWNX) Vanguard Target Retirement 2025 Fund (VTTVX) Vanguard Target Retirement 2030 Fund… Keep Reading

Do exchange-traded funds (ETF) that seek to mimic holdings of top-ranked hedge funds, firm insiders or other investing gurus offer attractive performance? To investigate, we consider nine ETFs, five live and four dead, in order of introduction: Invesco Insider Sentiment (NFO) – focuses on stocks attracting interest of insiders such as company executives, fund managers… Keep Reading

Does the Turn-of-the-Month Effect, a concentration of positive stock market returns around the turns of calendar months, work across a broad set of asset classes. To investigate, we measure turn-of-the-month (TOTM) returns for the following nine asset class exchange-traded funds (ETF) used in the “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” and the “Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy”: Invesco DB… Keep Reading