Investing Research Articles

How do U.S. non-profit endowment funds allocate and perform? In their November 2019 paper entitled “The Risk, Reward, and Asset Allocation of Nonprofit Endowment Funds”, Andrew Lo, Egor Matveyev and Stefan Zeume examine recent asset allocations and investment returns of U.S. public non-profit endowment funds. Due to the unstructured nature of asset reporting, they manually… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 8/31/20 through 9/4/20. 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.

How well did previously identified portfolio risk management strategies work during the COVID-19 market crash? In their July 2020 paper entitled “Strategic Risk Management: Out-of-Sample Evidence from the COVID-19 Equity Selloff”, Campbell Harvey, Edward Hoyle, Sandy Rattray and Otto Van Hemert extended analyses of risk management strategies they identified in a 2016-2019 series of papers… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 8/24/20 through 8/28/20. 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.

Does nominal stock price matter for associated option returns? In their May 2020 paper entitled “Cheap Options Are Expensive”, Assaf Eisdorfer, Amit Goyal and Alexei Zhdanov evaluate option returns across the range of U.S. stock prices. For each stock each month, they: Pick a single call option and a single put option closest to at-the-money… Keep Reading

Are portfolios of U.S. stocks that are double-sorted to capture benefits of two complementary return anomalies attractive? In their July 2020 paper entitled “Interacting Anomalies”, Karsten Müller and Simon Schmickler test all possible double-sorted portfolios across 102 stock return anomalies (10,302 double-sorts). They employ 5×5 double-sorts, first ranking stocks into fifths (quintiles) for one anomaly… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked for a comparison of two 50%-50% monthly rebalanced combinations of Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy (SACEVS) and Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) portfolios, as follows: 50-50 Best Value + EW Top 2: SACEVS Best Value plus SACEMS EW Top 2, employing a somewhat more aggressive momentum portfolio. 50-50 Best… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 8/17/20 through 8/21/20. 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.

How might an investor construct a portfolio of very risky assets? To investigate, we consider: First, diversifying with monthly rebalancing of: Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC), representing a very long-term option on Bitcoins. VanEck Vectors Junior Gold Miners ETF (GDXJ), representing a very long-term option on gold. ProShares Short VIX Short-Term Futures (SVXY), to capture part… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked whether forcing the Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) to agree with the Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy (SACEVS) when the latter assigns zero weight to stocks or government bonds improves the performance of the former. Specifically, the suggested change would force to Cash in SACEMS any allocation to SPDR… Keep Reading