Investing Research Articles

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 8/16/21 through 8/20/21. 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.

Is the WisdomTree approach to exchange-traded fund (ETF) cost efficiency and performance potential (Modern Alpha) attractive? To investigate, we compare performance statistics of six WisdomTree ETFs, all currently available, to those of “easy substitute” (widely used and very liquid) benchmark ETFs, as follows: WisdomTree U.S. Total Dividend Fund (DTD), with SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) as… Keep Reading

How well do derivatives traders perform, and why? In the July 2021 version of their paper entitled “Derivatives Leverage is a Double-Edged Sword”, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Ke Tang, Jingyuan Wang and Xuewei Yang study the performance of Chinese derivatives (futures) traders across 1,086 contracts on 51 underlying assets. They consider gross and net daily trader returns,… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 8/9/21 through 8/13/21. 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.

Should practitioners and academics doing research on financial markets be especially careful (compared to researchers in other fields) when employing statistical inference. In the July 2021 version of their paper entitled “Finance is Not Excused: Why Finance Should Not Flout Basic Principles of Statistics”, David Bailey and Marcos Lopez de Prado argue that three aspects… Keep Reading

Is it possible to isolate environmental, social and governance characteristics (ESG) effects on stock returns from those of other stock characteristics? In their July 2021 paper entitled “Chasing The ESG Factor”, Abraham Lioui and Andrea Tarelli specify a cross-sectional long-short ESG factor that neutralizes exposures to other firm characteristics, such as size and book-to-market ratio…. Keep Reading

When a public pension fund reports beating its benchmark, does that signify a job well done? In his July 2021 paper entitled “Cost, Performance, and Benchmark Bias of Public Pension Funds in the United States: An Unflattering Portrait”, Richard Ennis analyzes net returns of statewide pension funds in the U.S. He calculates both (1) net… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 8/2/21 through 8/6/21. 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.

The National Bank Act of 1863 created a national currency backed by U.S. Treasury bonds and curtailed the era of Free Banking (wildcat private currencies), which resembles the current environment of stablecoins (such as Tether and Diem). Subsequent legislation taxed private currencies out of existence. Does this history offer lessons for the future of stablecoins?… Keep Reading

In reaction to “Testing the EFA-SPY-TLT-PBBBX EW Strategy”, a subscriber asked about the performance of a strategy that each year rebalances to 25% SPDR S&P 500 (SPY), 10% iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Min Vol Factor (EEMV),  15% Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund (VT), 25% iShares Barclays 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT) and 25% PIA BBB Bond Fund (PBBBX)…. Keep Reading