August 23, 2017 Animal Spirits
Does financial market volatility identify bubbles and predict subsequent crashes? In their April 2017 paper entitled “Can We Use Volatility to Diagnose Financial Bubbles? Lessons from 40 Historical Bubbles”, Didier Sornette, Peter Cauwels and Georgi Smilyanov examine price...
August 22, 2017 Momentum Investing
Does incorporation of stock price acceleration boost the performance of a conventional momentum strategy? In their July 2017 paper entitled “Evolution of Historical Prices in Momentum Investing”, Li-Wen Chen, Hsin-Yi Yu and Wen-Kai Wang examine whether stock price...
August 18, 2017 Fundamental Valuation
Do markets exploitably misprice stocks? In their July 2017 paper entitled “Global Market Inefficiencies”, Söhnke Bartram and Mark Grinblatt assess the exploitability of deviations from fair stock prices worldwide based on publicly known accounting data. Specifically, they...
August 17, 2017 Animal Spirits
Do stock scammers use Twitter to manipulate prices of microcap stocks? In his August 2017 paper entitled “Market Manipulation and Suspicious Stock Recommendations on Social Media”, Thomas Renault performs an event study to analyze returns for...
August 16, 2017 Animal Spirits
Do changes in Twitter activity about a stock predict its future returns? In their July 2017 paper entitled “Is All that Twitters Gold? Social Media Attention and Stock Returns”, David Rakowski, Sara Shirley and Jeffrey Stark investigate whether...
August 15, 2017 Momentum Investing, Volatility Effects
What aspect of momentum strategy volatility is best for risk management? In his July 2017 paper entitled “Risk-Managed Momentum: The Effect of Leverage Constraints”, Federico Nucera examines stock momentum strategy risk management via different aspects...
August 11, 2017 Calendar Effects, Volatility Effects
Do the returns of iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-term Futures ETN (VXX) and VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX Short-term ETN (XIV) vary systematically across days of the week? To investigate, we look at daily close-to-open, open-to-close...
August 10, 2017 Equity Options, Equity Premium
Do aggregate positions in put and call options on individual stocks, as indicators of sentiment of informed traders, predict future market returns? In their July 2017 paper entitled “Stock Return Predictability: Consider Your Open Options”, Farhang...
August 9, 2017 Momentum Investing, Strategic Allocation
A subscriber asked about extending “Simple Momentum Strategy Applied to TSP Funds” back in time to 1988. That test employs the following five funds, all available to U.S. federal government employees via the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) as...
August 8, 2017 Fundamental Valuation, Value Premium
Are high-quality stocks worth the price? In the June 2017 update of their paper entitled “Quality Minus Junk”, Clifford Asness, Andrea Frazzini and Lasse Pedersen investigate whether high-quality stocks outperform low-quality stocks. They define high-quality stocks...
August 4, 2017 Calendar Effects, Strategic Allocation
Is there a preferred frequency and are there preferred months for rebalancing conventional asset class portfolio holdings? To investigate we consider annual, semiannual and quarterly rebalancing of a simple portfolio targeting a 60-40 stocks-bonds mix. We consider...
August 3, 2017 Momentum Investing, Strategic Allocation, Technical Trading
Does an asset class breadth rule work better than a class-by-class exclusion rule for momentum strategy crash protection? In their July 2017 paper entitled “Breadth Momentum and Vigilant Asset Allocation (VAA): Winning More by Losing...
August 2, 2017 Bonds, Equity Premium, Strategic Allocation
How differently does the “Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy” (SACEVS) perform when the U.S. stock market rises and falls? This strategy seeks to exploit relative valuation of the term risk premium, the credit (default) risk premium and the...
August 1, 2017 Bonds, Equity Premium, Strategic Allocation
A subscriber asked how the “Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy” (SACEVS) performs when interest rates rise. This strategy seeks to exploit relative valuation of the term risk premium, the credit (default) risk premium and the equity risk premium...
July 26, 2017 Fundamental Valuation, Value Premium
Do investors fixate on price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) and thereby create trading opportunities as P/Es change? In his June 2017 paper entitled “P/E Ratios and Value Investor Attention”, Jordan Moore examines market responses to U.S. common...
July 25, 2017 Momentum Investing, Strategic Allocation
A subscriber asked for augmentation of “SACEMS at Weekly and Biweekly Frequencies” to determine whether bimonthly (every two months) measurement of asset class momentum works better than monthly measurement as used in “Simple Asset Class ETF...
July 19, 2017 Equity Options
How well do stock index covered call strategies work across markets worldwide? In their June 2017 paper entitled “Covering the World: Global Evidence on Covered Calls”, Roni Israelov, Matthew Klein and Harsha Tummala test covered call strategies for...
July 18, 2017 Equity Options
Which short index options offer the best overall performance? In their June 2017 paper entitled “Which Index Options Should You Sell?”, Roni Israelov and Harsha Tummala explore return and risk properties of short delta-hedged out-of-the-money S&P 500 Index put...
July 17, 2017 Momentum Investing
Does time series (intrinsic or absolute) return momentum work everywhere all the time? In their June 2017 paper entitled “A Century of Evidence on Trend-Following Investing”, Brian Hurst, Yao Ooi and Lasse Pedersen investigate the robustness of intrinsic...
July 14, 2017 Momentum Investing
Is recent Fama-French 5-factor alpha (accounting for market, size, book-to-market, profitability and investment risks) a useful predictor of U.S. equity sector performance? In other words, is there an alpha momentum anomaly at the sector level? In...
July 13, 2017 Momentum Investing
Do stock return momentum and reversal strategies work better when focused on certain intraday intervals rather than close-to-close, according to whether trades are primarily exploiting information or supplying liquidity? In his April 2017 paper entitled...
July 12, 2017 Big Ideas, Strategic Allocation
Michael Covel prefaces the 2017 Fifth Edition of his book, Trend Following: How to Make a Fortune in Bull, Bear, and Black Swan Markets, by stating that: “The 233,092 words in this book are the result of...
July 11, 2017 Economic Indicators, Mutual/Hedge Funds
Do hedge funds demonstrate the exploitability of real-time economic data? In their June 2017 paper entitled “Can Hedge Funds Time the Market?”, Michael Brandt, Federico Nucera and Giorgio Valente evaluate whether all or some equity hedge funds...
July 10, 2017 Equity Premium, Volatility Effects
Is the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), which relates the return of an asset to its non-diversifiable risk, called beta, worth learning? In his June 2017 paper (provocatively) entitled “Is It Ethical to Teach That Beta...
July 7, 2017 Momentum Investing, Strategic Allocation
What is the most effective way to hedge against equity market crashes? In their June 2017 paper entitled “The Best Strategies for the Worst Crises”, Michael Cook, Edward Hoyle, Matthew Sargaison, Dan Taylor and Otto Van Hemert examine active and passive strategies...