Investing Research Articles

Does commercial and industrial (C&I) credit fuel business growth and thereby drive the stock market? To investigate, we relate changes in credit standards from the Federal Reserve Board’s quarterly Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices to future U.S. stock market returns. Presumably, loosening (tightening) of credit standards is good (bad) for stocks. The… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/21/25 through 1/24/25. 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.

Do “great stock picks” from Forbes beat the market? To investigate, we evaluate stock picks for 2022, 2023 and 2024 via  “10 Great Stock Picks for 2022 from Top-Performing Fund Managers”, “20 Great Stock Ideas for 2023 from Top-Performing Fund Managers” and “10 Best Stocks For 2024”. For each year and each stock, we compute… Keep Reading

A subscriber requested a test of Ray Dalio‘s All Weather (AW) portfolio with different rebalancing frequencies, allocated to exchange-traded funds (ETF) as asset class proxies as follows: 30% – Vanguard Total Stock Market (VTI) 40% – iShares 20+ Year Treasury (TLT) 15% – iShares 7-10 Year Treasury (IEF) 7.5% – SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) 7.5% –… Keep Reading

Generative large language models (LLM), such as ChatGPT, are best known for conversational summation of complex information. Their use in financial forecasting focuses on discrete news sentiment signals of positive (1), neutral (0) or negative (-1). Is there a way to extract more granularity in LLM sentiment estimates? In their October 2024 paper entitled “Cut… Keep Reading

Past research relating U.S. stock market returns to the party holding the Presidency mostly concludes that Democratic presidents are better for the stock market than Republican presidents. However, Presidents share power conferred by the electorate with Congress. Does historical data confirm that Democratic control of Congress is also better for stock market returns than Republican… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/13/25 through 1/17/25. 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 full-year Trading Calendar indicates that the U.S. stock market has three phases over the calendar year, corresponding to calendar year trading days 1-84 (January-April), 85-210 (May-October) and 211-252 (November-December). What are typical stock market returns and return variabilities for these phases? Using daily S&P 500 Index closes from the end of December 1927 through… Keep Reading

“Exploiting the Presidential Cycle and Party in Power” summarizes strategies that hold small stocks (large stock or bonds) when Democrats (Republicans) hold the U.S. presidency. How has this strategy performed in recent years? To investigate, we consider three strategy alternatives using exchange-traded funds (ETF): D-IWM:R-SPY: hold iShares Russell 2000 (IWM) when Democrats hold the presidency and SPDR… Keep Reading

The Inflation Forecast now incorporates actual total and core Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for December 2024. The actual total (core) inflation rate is slightly higher than (slightly lower than) forecasted.