July 8, 2014 Mutual/Hedge Funds
Are alternative mutual funds attractive for retail investors as hedge fund surrogates? In their June 2014 paper entitled “Performance of Alternative Mutual Funds: The Average Investors Hedge Fund”, Srinidhi Kanuri and Robert McLeod analyze the performance of alternative mutual...
July 3, 2014 Technical Trading
Does technical market analysis work? In their June 2014 paper entitled “Technical Market Indicators: An Overview”, Jiali Fang, Yafeng Qin and Ben Jacobsen examine the profitability of 93 market indicators as applied to the S&P 500. Of the...
July 2, 2014 Bonds
Do new funds have the latitude to concentrate in the best opportunities while they remain small? In his June 2014 presentation package entitled “How Long Might An Active Bond ETF’s ‘Best Ideas’ Outperformance Window Last?”,...
June 30, 2014 Strategic Allocation
Does using after-tax, rather than pre-tax, returns make a big difference in allocating assets based on mean-variance optimization? In their June 2014 paper entitled “What Would Yale Do If It Were Taxable?” Patrick Geddes, Lisa Goldberg and Stephen...
June 26, 2014 Economic Indicators, Strategic Allocation
Risk parity asset strategies generally make large allocations to low-volatility assets such as bonds, which tend to fall in value when interest rates rise. Is risk parity a safe strategy when rates rise? In their June 2014...
June 24, 2014 Equity Premium
What are the main investment behaviors of emerging markets and component stocks? In their January 2014 paper entitled “Studies of Equity Returns in Emerging Markets: A Literature Review”, Yigit Atilgan, Ozgur Demirtas and Koray Simsek survey the stream...
June 20, 2014 Momentum Investing, Strategic Allocation
The “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” each month allocates all funds to the one of the following eight asset class exchange-traded funds (ETF), or cash, with the highest total return over the past five months: PowerShares...
June 16, 2014 Momentum Investing, Strategic Allocation
A subscriber suggested an alternative to the “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” that weights asset class ETFs according to five-month past return ranking (such as 35-25-20-10-4-3-2-1) rather than allocating all funds to the winner. Do the diversification benefits...
June 12, 2014 Momentum Investing, Strategic Allocation
We have updated the detail at “Momentum Strategy” to incorporate the historical data changes described in “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy Data Changes”. The principal effects are to decrease the performance of the Top 1 portfolio...
June 12, 2014 Technical Trading
In reaction to “10-month Versus 40-week Versus 200-day SMA”, a reader inquired whether using measurement intervals of longer than a month to calculate simple moving averages (SMA) would suppress trading compared to monthly intervals and thereby...
June 11, 2014 Calendar Effects
Do returns for segments of the normal U.S. stock market trading day (9:30 AM to 4:00 PM Eastern time) exhibit exploitable interactions? In the May 2014 version of their paper entitled “Intraday Momentum: The First...
June 9, 2014 Individual Investing, Momentum Investing, Mutual/Hedge Funds
Do individuals who actively reallocate funds within their pension accounts outperform passive counterparts? In the March 2014 update of their paper entitled “Individual Investor Activity and Performance”, Magnus Dahlquist, Jose Vicente Martinez and Paul Soderlind examine...
June 6, 2014 Momentum Investing
Does the return to momentum investing reliably reflect a reward for taking some risk? In the March 2014 version of her paper entitled “Asymmetric Risks of Momentum Strategies”, Victoria Dobrynskaya examines the performance of past winner and loser...
June 4, 2014 Momentum Investing
Is relative momentum an effective way to switch between stocks and bonds? In his May 2014 paper entitled “Simple and Effective Market Timing with Tactical Asset Allocation”, Lewis Glenn compares the performances of two tactical asset...
June 2, 2014 Momentum Investing, Technical Trading, Value Premium
Do relative momentum and trend filters operate differently on value and growth stocks? In their May 2014 paper entitled “When Growth Beats Value: Removing Tail Risk from Global Equity Momentum Strategies”, Andrew Clare, James Seaton, Peter...
May 30, 2014 Momentum Investing
In checking data for the monthly update of “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” (SACEMS), we discovered changes in historical dividend/split-adjusted prices for the following strategy components: iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index (EEM) iShares MSCI EAFE...
May 30, 2014 Momentum Investing, Value Premium
What about all those criticisms of momentum investing (such as high turnover/trading frictions and crash-proneness)? In the May 2014 draft of their paper entitled “Fact, Fiction and Momentum Investing”, Clifford Asness, Andrea Frazzini, Ronen Israel and...
May 29, 2014 Calendar Effects
Does the Sell-in-May/Halloween effect hold in recent data? In their April 2014 paper entitled “Sell in May and Go Away: Still Good Advice for Investors?”, Hubert Dichtl and Wolfgang Drobetz explore whether holding one of several stock indexes (cash)...
May 23, 2014 Equity Premium, Momentum Investing, Size Effect, Value Premium
Are investors exhausting the potential of stocks? In his May 2014 presentation packages entitled “Has The Stock Market Been ‘Overgrazed’?” and “Momentum Has Not Been ‘Overgrazed'”, Claude Erb investigates the proposition that sanguine research and ever easier...
May 22, 2014 Individual Investing, Technical Trading
Does technical analysis boost or depress performance for individual investors? In their February 2014 paper entitled “Technical Analysis and Individual Investors”, Arvid Hoffmann and Hersh Shefrin combine actual trading histories and results of a survey to investigate the...
May 20, 2014 Economic Indicators, Strategic Allocation
Does the relative performance of 10-year U.S. Treasuries and 30-year U.S. Treasuries offer a useful risk-on/risk-off regime change signal? In their February 2014 paper entitled “An Intermarket Approach to Tactical Risk Rotation Using the Signaling Power of...
May 19, 2014 Technical Trading
Is is feasible to exploit stock price deviation from a purely statistical estimate of equilibrium? In his February 2014 paper entitled “Back to Black” (the National Association of Active Investment Managers’ 2014 Wagner Award second place winner), Arthur Grabovsky investigates exploitation...
May 16, 2014 Big Ideas
Is there a practical way to mitigating data snooping bias while exploring optimal parameter values? In his February 2014 paper entitled “Know Your System! – Turning Data Mining from Bias to Benefit through System Parameter Permutation” (the National Association of Active Investment...
May 15, 2014 Fundamental Valuation, Sentiment Indicators
Research (see “Asset Growth Rate as a Return Indicator” and “Asset Growth a Bad Sign for Stocks Everywhere?”) indicates that stocks of firms with high asset growth rates tend subsequently to underperform the market. Does...
May 12, 2014 Strategic Allocation
What factors make asset class diversification work? To investigate empirically, we consider the following mix of exchange-traded funds (ETF) as asset class proxies (the same used in “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy”): PowerShares DB Commodity Index...