Investing Research Articles

Does the Fama-French  5-factor model (market, size, book-to-market, profitability, investment) of stock returns work for stocks worldwide? In their May 2021 paper entitled “Size, Value, Profitability, and Investment Effects in International Stock Returns: Are They Really There?”, Nusret Cakici and Adam Zaremba test the performance of the 5-factor model in global developed markets. They consider big… Keep Reading

Is firm book value-to-market price ratio (B/M) obsolete due to growing importance of intangible assets? Is it still widely used by institutional investors? In their May 2021 paper entitled “Going by the Book: Valuation Ratios and Stock Returns”, Ki-Soon Choi, Eric So and Charles Wang examine continuing of B/M for value investing and implications of… Keep Reading

Does failure to replicate dampen interest in previously published research? In their May 2021 paper entitled “Non-replicable Publications Are Cited More Than Replicable Ones”, Marta Serra-Garcia and Uri Gneezy use results of three recent replication studies to compare citation rates for papers published in top psychology, economics and general science journals that fail to replicate… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/1/21 through 6/4/21. 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.

Are non-fungible tokens (NFT) the future of music and art valuation? In his April 2021 early/incomplete draft entitled “Virtual Art and Non-fungible Tokens”, Lawrence Trautman describes the new market for digital art, explores the evolution of the digital world and virtual property, explores NFTs and offers a few thoughts about the future of digital property…. Keep Reading

Is periodic rebalancing of a stock portfolio advantageous? In his May 2021 paper entitled “Does Volatility Harvesting Really Work?”, Magnus Pedersen compares performances of periodic rebalancing versus no rebalancing (buy-and-hold) for thousands of randomly constructed and initially equal-weighted portfolios of U.S. stocks. He tries different numbers of holdings, different start/end dates and different rebalancing intervals… Keep Reading

Is the known weakening of stock anomalies after publication due more to in-sample overfitting by researchers or post-publication exploitation by arbitrageurs (market adaptation)? In their May 2021 paper entitled “Why and How Systematic Strategies Decay”, Antoine Falck, Adam Rej and David Thesmar examine the typical post-publication risk-adjusted performance (Sharpe ratio) of U.S. stock anomalies. They… Keep Reading

Can investors detect when commodity futures momentum, value and carry (basis) strategies are crowded and therefore likely to generate relatively weak returns? In the March 2021 version of their paper entitled “Crowding and Factor Returns”, Wenjin Kang, Geert Rouwenhorst and Ke Tang examine how crowding by commodity futures traders affects expected returns for momentum, value… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/24/21 through 5/28/21. 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.

A subscriber inquired whether a longer test of the “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” (SACEMS) is feasible using mutual funds rather than exchange-traded funds (ETF) as asset class proxies. To investigate, we consider the following set of mutual funds (partly adapted from the paper summarized in “Asset Allocation Combining Momentum, Volatility, Correlation and Crash Protection”): Vanguard Total Stock… Keep Reading