Recent Investing Research

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 3/1/21 through 3/5/21. 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.

Do negative environmental, social and governance (ESG) incidents (environmental pollution, poor employment conditions or anti-competitive practices) indicate poor firm management and therefore underperforming stocks? In his February 2021 paper entitled “ESG Incidents and Shareholder Value”, Simon Glossner analyzes ESG incident data to determine whether: (1) history is predictive of future ESG incidents; (2) high incident… Keep Reading

Are gold and bitcoin similar assets? In his December 2020 paper entitled “Bitcoin is Exactly Like Gold Except When it Isn’t”, Claude Erb compares and contrasts the following aspects of gold and bitcoin: Inflation hedge – how well an asset tracks some measure of inflation/purchasing power. Store of value – the ability of an asset… Keep Reading

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

Value investing performance over the past two decades is poor. Is this underperformance a temporary consequence of an unusual macro environment, or a reflection of permanent economic/equity market changes. In their February 2021 paper entitled “Value Investing: Requiem, Rebirth or Reincarnation?”, Bradford Cornell and Aswath Damodaran survey the history and alternative approaches to value investing,… Keep Reading

Regarding “Money Supply (M2) and the Stock Market”, a subscriber responded: “I’ve always thought…that both M2 and velocity were needed. If there’s more money, but it is not circulating, then it doesn’t have a chance to have much impact. That’s the situation we have right now for the most part.” The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis… Keep Reading

We have updated monthly allocations and performance data for the Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) and the Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy (SACEVS). We have also updated performance data for the Combined Value-Momentum Strategy. We have updated the Trading Calendar to incorporate data for February 2021.

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 2/22/21 through 2/26/21. 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.

The home page, Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) and Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy (SACEVS) now show preliminary positions for March 2021. The top three SACEMS ETFs are unlikely to change by the close. SACEVS allocations are unlikely to change by the close.

A reader commented: “M2 cannot be an accurate money supply measure because it includes non-cash investments such as money market mutual funds. When the stock market corrects and people are exchanging stocks for say, money market mutual fund shares, the M2 figure will actually increase. The money supply is not literally increasing in such cases… Keep Reading