Investing Research Articles

Is there an optimal net (incorporating trading frictions) trend-following strategy for broad stock portfolios? In their November 2022 paper entitled “Optimal Trend-Following With Transaction Costs”, Valeriy Zakamulin and Javier Giner develop and test a simple model that incorporates short-term return persistence (trend) and trading frictions (half bid-ask spread, fees and impact of trading). Their trend-following… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/9/23 through 1/13/23. 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.

Can investors make the stock return momentum effect stronger/more reliable by isolating stocks for which many similar stocks exhibit very strong or very weak past returns? In his December 2022 paper entitled “Neighbouring Assets”, Sina Seyfi explores this question by sorting stocks based on average past returns of other stocks with the most similar sets… Keep Reading

If a published theory is correct, its empirical results should hold for years after original test samples end. Are peer-reviewed, theory-supported (risk-based) academic studies of stock return predictors thereby superior to other streams of predictor research, and thereby especially useful to investors? In their December 2022 paper entitled “Peer-Reviewed Theory Does Not Help Predict the… Keep Reading

Do stocks with high exposures to new technologies outperform? In her December 2022 paper entitled “New Technologies and Stock Returns”, Jinyoung Kim examines future returns of stocks with relatively high exposures to new technologies as measured via patent analysis. Each June, she applies machine learning to both textual and citation information to detect technology areas… Keep Reading

A subscriber requested confirmation that a strategy of holding SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) at all times except options expiration week beats holding SPY all the time. To investigate, we look at holding SPY at all times except from the close on the second Friday of each month to the close on the third… Keep Reading

What is the critical success factor for experienced traders? In their December 2022 paper entitled “Strategic Sophistication and Trading Profits: An Experiment with Professional Traders”, Marco Angrisani, Marco Cipriani and Antonio Guarino compare results from a competitive trading game, a competitive guessing game and individual cognitive/risk preference/personality tests to determine what characteristics most strongly relate… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/3/23 through 1/6/23. 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.

How should investors think about, and perhaps exploit, asset return volatility? In his December 2022 paper entitled “A Stylized History of Volatility”, Emanuel Derman reviews how generations of financial modelers have quantified volatility and ultimately created tradable volatility-based assets. He also discusses some general modeling considerations. Based on the body of research and his experience,… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked about the performance of a strategy that each month allocates funds to pairs of exchange-traded fund (ETF) asset class proxies according to the term spread, as measured by the difference in yields between the 10-Year constant maturity U.S. Treasury note and the 3-Month U.S. Treasury bill (T-bill). Specifically: When the term spread is… Keep Reading