January 15, 2021 Miscellaneous
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/11/21 through 1/15/21. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
January 14, 2021 Bonds, Calendar Effects, Equity Premium
A subscriber requested evaluation of three retirement investment alternatives, assuming a constant increment invested at the end of each month, as follows: 50-50: allocate each increment via fixed percentages to stocks and bonds (for comparability,...
January 8, 2021 Miscellaneous
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/4/21 through 1/8/21. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
January 8, 2021 Big Ideas, Currency Trading
How might crypto-assets transform finance? In their December 2020 paper entitled “DeFi and the Future of Finance”, Campbell Harvey, Ashwin Ramachandran and Joey Santoro examine the potential for decentralized finance (DeFi) to disrupt traditional financial...
December 31, 2020 Miscellaneous
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/28/20 through 12/31/20. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
December 30, 2020 Bonds, Fundamental Valuation
How does the Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings ratio (CAPE, or P/E10) behave during the COVID-19 pandemic? What are its current implications? In the November 2020 revision of their paper entitled “CAPE and the COVID-19 Pandemic Effect”,...
December 24, 2020 Miscellaneous
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/21/20 through 12/24/20. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
December 23, 2020 Bonds, Equity Premium, Strategic Allocation
“Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy” (SACEVS) finds that investors may be able to exploit relative valuation of the term risk premium, the credit (default) risk premium and the equity risk premium via exchange-traded funds (ETF)....
December 22, 2020 Big Ideas
Many institutional investors are attempting to exploit alternative data (less structured and more obscure than traditional data) to boost portfolio performance, supporting a complex system of data collectors, aggregators and organizers. How do they approach...
December 21, 2020 Bonds, Equity Premium, Strategic Allocation
Is there a better way than the Fed model to measure relative attractiveness of equities and bonds. In his October 2020 paper entitled “Towards a Better Fed Model”, Raymond Micaletti examines seven Fed Model alternatives,...
December 18, 2020 Miscellaneous
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/14/20 through 12/18/20. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
December 18, 2020 Short Selling
Do surprising fluctuations in short interest ratios of stocks indicate new information from short sellers that predicts returns of these stocks? In their November 2020 paper entitled “Surprise in Short Interest”, Matthias Hanauer, Pavel Lesnevski...
December 16, 2020 Bonds, Equity Premium, Gold, Technical Trading
A subscriber asked about a strategy that switches between an equal-weighted portfolio of Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) and iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) when the S&P 500 Index is above its 200-day simple moving average...
December 15, 2020 Equity Premium, Value Premium
Do extreme equity market valuations represent opportunities in value stocks? In their October 2020 paper entitled “Extrapolators at the Gate: Market-wide Misvaluation and the Value Premium”, Stefano Cassella, Zhaojing Chen, Huseyin Gulen and Ralitsa Petkova...
December 14, 2020 Strategic Allocation
Target-date funds (TDFs) are popular fund-of-funds retirement investments that offer asset class diversification and periodic rebalancing aimed at a specific retirement year. TDFs typically charge layers of fees (fund-of-funds fee plus fees of underlying funds)....
December 11, 2020 Miscellaneous
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/7/20 through 12/11/20. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
December 10, 2020 Currency Trading
Does Bitcoin behave like some other asset class? To investigate, we use the easily held, liquid and matched-close Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) as a proxy for Bitcoin holdings and calculate daily and monthly return correlations...
December 9, 2020 Calendar Effects, Equity Options, Momentum Investing
Do options of individual stocks exhibit momentum and seasonality patterns? In their November 2020 paper entitled “Momentum, Reversal, and Seasonality in Option Returns”, Christopher Jones, Mehdi Khorram and Haitao Mo investigate momentum and seasonality effects...
December 8, 2020 Currency Trading, Equity Premium
Is the currency carry trade, as implemented by exchange-traded funds/notes (ETF/ETN), attractive? To investigate, we consider two currency carry trade ETF/ETNs, one live (with low trading volume) and one dead: PowerShares DB G10 Currency Harvest...
December 4, 2020 Miscellaneous
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 11/30/20 through 12/4/20. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
December 3, 2020 Short Selling
Do stocks with high borrowing costs (loan fees) exhibit predictably low short-term returns? In their November 2020 paper entitled “Borrowing Fees and Expected Stock Returns”, Kaitlin Hendrix and Gavin Crabb explore whether stock loan fees...
December 2, 2020 Calendar Effects, Commodity Futures
Does crude oil (an important part of commodity indexes) exhibit an exploitable price seasonality? To check, we examine three monthly series: Spot prices for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) Cushing, Oklahoma crude oil since the beginning...
November 30, 2020 Big Ideas, Economic Indicators, Equity Premium
How connected are principal measures of U.S. economic activity and U.S. stock market performance? In their October 2020 paper entitled “Has the Stock Market Become Less Representative of the Economy?”, Frederik Schlingemann and René Stulz...
November 27, 2020 Miscellaneous
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 11/23/20 through 11/27/20. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to...
November 27, 2020 Currency Trading
How are attitudes toward Bitcoin as an investment evolving? In their October 2020 survey report entitled “Comparing Public Bitcoin Adoption Rates in 2020 vs 2017”, the Tokenist summarizes findings from a survey using the same...