Do any of the various U.S. stock market size and value/growth styles systematically lead or lag the overall market, perhaps because of some underlying business/economic cycle? To investigate, we consider the the following six exchange-traded...
Readers have suggested three alternative metrics for the strategy tested in the “Simple Sector ETF Momentum Strategy Performance”: (1) Sharpe Ratio over the past six months; (2) slope of price over the past six months;...
In the preface to the eleventh (2015) edition of his book entitled A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing, author Burton Malkiel states: “The message of the original edition was a very simple one:...
In an effort to generate more responsive exchange-traded fund (ETF) momentum switching, a subscriber proposed a version of the “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” (SACEMS) that measures ETF returns from the lowest daily close...
Does a cross-asset class, momentum-driven, simplified version of Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) offer reliably strong performance over the long run? In their December 2014 paper entitled “A Century of Generalized Momentum; From Flexible Asset Allocations (FAA) to Elastic...
Does diversification into alternative asset class investments, which may carry high management fees, help on a net basis? In the December 2014 version of their paper entitled “Fees Eat Diversification’s Lunch”, William Jennings and Brian Payne examine the diversification...
Does interest in, or concern about, financial markets as expressed in Internet searches predict stock market behavior? In the December 2014 revision of their paper entitled “Can We Predict the Financial Markets Based on Google’s...
Does the currency carry trade, financing short-term deposits in currencies with high interest rates with short-term loans in currencies with low interest rates (or being long and short forward contracts in currencies with high and...
Is firm profitability trend, or momentum, a useful indicator of future stock returns? In their December 2014 paper entitled “The Trend in Firm Profitability and the Cross Section of Stock Returns”, Ferhat Akbas, Chao Jiang and Paul Koch...
Should investors expect mutual fund managers to generate value via timely trades? In their November 2014 paper entitled “Do Funds Make More When They Trade More?”, Lubos Pastor, Robert Stambaugh and Lucian Taylor investigate the relationship between mutual...
Does the expanding set of exchange-traded funds (ETF) support reliable replication (cloning) of future returns for some hedge funds? In their December 2014 paper entitled “Smart Beta ETF Portfolios: Cloning Beta Active Hedge Funds”, Jun Duanmu,...
A subscriber suggested evaluation of average investor allocation to stocks as “The Single Greatest Predictor of Future Stock Market Returns”. For this evaluation, we test simple ways to time the broad U.S. stock market using...
Are stock betas calculated with price jumps (arguably derived from informed trading) more useful than those calculated conventionally (arguably dominated by noise trading)? In the December 2014 version of their paper entitled “Roughing Up Beta: Continuous vs. Discontinuous Betas, and the Cross-Section of...
How big is the stock liquidity premium and does it subsume other variables widely used to estimate future returns? In their December 2014 paper entitled “A Comparative Analysis of Liquidity Measures”, Yuping Huang and Vasilios...
Do changes in consensus analyst earnings forecasts that disagree with contemporaneous stock returns signal exploitable mispricings? In their November 2014 paper entitled “To Follow or Not to Follow – An Analysis of the Profitability of Portfolio Strategies...
Is equal weighting (1/n) of portfolio components a good choice? In their November 2014 paper entitled “Is 1/n Really Better Than Optimal Mean-Variance Portfolio?”, Woo Chang Kim, Yongjae Lee and William Ziemba assess 1/n weighting by comparing its...
Does a need to attract attention distort the information offered by online stock bloggers? Does competition among them suppress or amplify this distortion? In their November 2014 paper entitled “Guru Dreams and Competition: An Anatomy of the Economics of...
Do predictable monthly outflows from and inflows to mutual funds drive the Turn-of-the-Month (TOTM) effect, a concentration of positive stock market returns around the turns of calendar months? In their November 2014 paper entitled “Dash...
Referring to “Leading Economic Index and the Stock Market”, a subscriber inquired about using the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the U.S. to generate long-term U.S. stock market timing signals, as follows: “How about...
How do the major components of U.S. stock market performance behave over time? In his October 2014 paper entitled “Long-Term Sources of Investment Returns and a Simple Way to Enhance Equity Returns”, Baijnath Ramraika decomposes long-term returns...
How diverse are the beliefs of experts on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)? In his November paper entitled “CAPM: The Model and 233 Comments about It”, Pablo Fernandez reproduces 52 largely disagreeing and 181 largely agreeing...
Is the difference between upside and downside asset participation ratios relative to a benchmark a useful metric for evaluating asset investment performance? In his June 2014 paper entitled “On the Holy Grail of ‘Upside Participation and...
How can investors protect portfolios from crashes across asset classes? In the November 2014 version of his paper entitled “Tail Risk Protection in Asset Management”, Cristian Homescu describes tail (crash) risk metrics and summarizes the body...
Is equity factor investing a straightforward path to premium capture and diversification? In their October 2014 paper entitled “Facts and Fantasies About Factor Investing”, Zelia Cazalet and Thierry Roncalli summarize the body of research on factor investing and...
Is Piotroski’s FSCORE really as effective at picking stocks as indicated in the original study, which screens stocks with high book-to-market ratios to isolate those that will eventually provide high returns? In their April 2014 paper entitled “Implementability of Trading...