Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/18/18 through 6/22/18. 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.

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The “Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy” seeks diversification across a small set of asset class exchanged-traded funds (ETF), plus a monthly tactical edge from potential undervaluation of three risk premiums:

1. Term – monthly difference between the 10-year Constant Maturity U.S. Treasury note (T-note) yield and the 3-month Constant Maturity U.S. Treasury bill (T-bill) yield.
2. Credit – monthly difference between the Moody’s Seasoned Baa Corporate Bonds yield and the T-note yield.
3. Equity – monthly difference between S&P 500 operating earnings yield and the T-note yield.

Premium valuations are relative to historical averages. How might this strategy react to increases in the Effective Federal Funds Rate (EFFR)? Using monthly values of the three risk premiums, EFFR, total 12-month U.S. inflation and core 12-month U.S. inflation during July 2000 (limited by availability of EFFR) through May 2018 (215 months), we find that: Keep Reading

Do currency exchange factor strategies usefully diversify a set of conventional asset classes? In their May 2018 paper entitled “Currency Management with Style”, Harald Lohre and Martin Kolrep investigate the systematic harvesting of currency exchange carry, value and momentum strategies, specified as follows and applied to the G10 currencies:

• Carry – buy (sell) the three equally weighted currency forwards with the highest (lowest) short-term interest rates, reformed monthly.
• Momentum – buy (sell) the three equally weighted currency forwards with the greatest (least) appreciation over the past three months, reformed monthly.
• Value (long-term reversion) – buy (sell) the three equally weighted currency forwards with the lowest (highest) change in their real exchange rates, based on purchasing power parity, over the past 60 months, reformed monthly.

They examine in-sample (full-sample) mean-variance relationships for these strategies to assess their value as diversifiers of five conventional asset classes (U.S. stocks, commodities, U.S. Treasury bonds, U.S. corporate investment-grade bonds and U.S. corporate high-yield bonds). They also look at potential out-of-sample benefits of these strategies based on information available at the time of each monthly rebalancing as additions to a risk parity portfolio of the five conventional assets from the perspective. For this out-of-sample test, they consider both minimum variance (tail risk hedging) and mean-variance optimization (return seeking) for aggregating the three currency strategies. Using monthly data for the selected assets from the end of January 1999 through December 2016, they find that: Keep Reading

“Is There Really an Size Effect?” summarizes research challenging the materiality of the equity size effect. Is there a counter? In their June 2018 paper entitled “It Has Been Very Easy to Beat the S&P500 in 2000-2018. Several Examples”, Pablo Fernandez and Pablo Acin double down on the size effect via a combination of market capitalization thresholds and equal weighting. Specifically, they compare values of a $100 initial investment at the beginning of January 2000, held through April 2018, in:

• The market capitalization-weighted (MW) S&P 500.
• The equally weighted (EW) 20, 40, 60 and 80 of the smallest stocks in the S&P 1500, reformed either every 12 months or every 24 months.

All portfolios are dividend-reinvested. Their objective is to provide investors with facts to aid portfolio analysis and selection of investment criteria. Using returns for the specified stocks over the selected sample period, they find that:

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Trading Calendar presents full-year and monthly cumulative performance profiles for the overall stock market (S&P 500 Index) based on its average daily behavior since 1950. How much do the corresponding monthly behaviors of the various size and value/growth styles deviate from an overall equity market profile? To investigate, we consider the the following six exchange-traded funds (ETF) that cut across capitalization (large, medium and small) and value versus growth:

iShares Russell 1000 Value Index (IWD) – large capitalization value stocks.
iShares Russell 1000 Growth Index (IWF) – large capitalization growth stocks.
iShares Russell Midcap Value Index (IWS) – mid-capitalization value stocks.
iShares Russell Midcap Growth Index (IWP) – mid-capitalization growth stocks.
iShares Russell 2000 Value Index (IWN) – small capitalization value stocks.
iShares Russell 2000 Growth Index (IWO) – small capitalization growth stocks.

Using monthly dividend-adjusted closing prices for the style ETFs and S&P Depository Receipts (SPY) over the period August 2001 through May 2018 (202 months, limited by data for IWS/IWP), we find that: Keep Reading

“Beat the Market with Hot-Anomaly Switching?” concludes that “a trader who periodically switches to the hottest known anomaly based on a rolling window of past performance may be able to beat the market. Anomalies appear to have their own kind of momentum.” Does momentum therefore work for style-based exchange-traded funds (ETF)? To investigate, we apply a simple momentum strategy to the following six ETFs that cut across market capitalization (large, medium and small) and value versus growth:

iShares Russell 1000 Value Index (IWD) – large capitalization value stocks.
iShares Russell 1000 Growth Index (IWF) – large capitalization growth stocks.
iShares Russell Midcap Value Index (IWS) – mid-capitalization value stocks.
iShares Russell Midcap Growth Index (IWP) – mid-capitalization growth stocks.
iShares Russell 2000 Value Index (IWN) – small capitalization value stocks.
iShares Russell 2000 Growth Index (IWO) – small capitalization growth stocks.

We test a simple Top 1 strategy that allocates all funds each month to the one style ETF with the highest total return over a set momentum measurement (ranking or lookback) interval. We focus on the baseline ranking interval from “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy”, but test sensitivity of findings to ranking intervals ranging from one to 12 months. As benchmarks, we consider an equally weighted and monthly rebalanced combination of all six style ETFs (EW All), buying and holding S&P Depository Receipts (SPY), and holding SPY when the S&P 500 Index is above its 10-month simple moving average and U.S. Treasury bills (T-bills) when the index is below its 10-month simple moving average (SPY:SMA10). We consider the performance metrics used in “Momentum Strategy (SACEMS)”. Using monthly dividend-adjusted closing prices for the style ETFs and SPY, monthly levels of the S&P 500 index and monthly yields for 3-month T-bills during August 2001 (limited by IWS and IWP) through May 2018 (202 months, ), we find that:

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Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/11/18 through 6/15/18. 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. Keep Reading

Does separating the active (alpha) and passive (market exposure, or beta) components of an overall equity investment strategy, thereby isolating turnover, reduce overall tax burden? In their May 2018 paper entitled “The Tax Benefits of Separating Alpha from Beta”, Joseph Liberman, Clemens Sialm, Nathan Sosner and Lixin Wang investigate the tax implications of separating alpha from beta for equity investments. Specifically, they compare two quantitative investment strategies:

1. Conventional long-only – overweights (underweights) stocks with favorable (unfavorable) multi-factor exposures within a single portfolio.
2. Composite long-short – allocates separately to a passive (index fund) portfolio and to an active long-short portfolio targeting multi-factor exposures but with no exposure to the market.

They design these competing strategies so that aggregate exposures to the market and target factors, and thus pre-tax returns, are similar. They consider three target factors: value (60-month reversion) and momentum (from 12 months ago to one month ago), together and separately; and, short-term (1-month) reversal only separately. Their base simulation model has: 8% average annual market return with 15% volatility; 2% average incremental annual return for each target factor with 4% volatility; and, 180% annual turnover for value, momentum and value-momentum and 1200% annual turnover for short-term reversal. Their test methodology involves 100 iterations of: simulating a multifactor return distribution of 500 stocks; then, simulating portfolios of these stocks with monthly factor rebalancing for 25 years. They assume long-term (short-term) capital gain tax rate 20% (35%) and a highest-in, first-out disposition method for rebalancing. Based on the specified simulations, they find that: Keep Reading

Are Bollinger Bands (BB) useful for specifying when to buy low and when to sell high the overall U.S. stock market? In other words, can an investor beat a buy-and-hold strategy by systematically buying (selling) when the market crosses below (above) the lower (upper) BB? To check, we examine the historical behavior of BBs around the 21-trading day (one month) simple moving average (SMA) of S&P 500 SPDR (SPY) as a tradable proxy for the U.S. stock market. We consider BB settings ranging from 0 to 2.5 standard deviations of daily returns, calculated over the same trailing 21 trading days. Using daily unadjusted closes of of SPY (to calculate BBs), dividend-adjusted closes of SPY (to calculate total returns) and contemporaneous yields for 3-month Treasury bills (T-bill) from the end of January 1993 (SPY inception) through early May 2018, we find that: Keep Reading

Do changes in firm financial reporting practices signal bad news to come? In the February 2018 update of their paper entitled “Lazy Prices”, Lauren Cohen, Christopher Malloy and Quoc Nguyen investigate relationships between changes in firm financial reporting practices (SEC 10-K, 10-K405, 10-KSB and 10-Q filings) and future firm/stock performance. They focus on quarter-to-quarter changes in content bases on four distinct textual similarity metrics. Each month, they rank all firms into fifths (quintiles) for each of the four metrics. They then compute equally weighted or value-weighted returns for these quintiles over future months (such that there are overlapping portfolios for each quintile and each metric), with stock weights within quintile portfolios rebalanced monthly for equal weighting. They measure the effect of changes in financial reporting practices as monthly return for a hedge portfolio that is long (short) the quintile with the smallest (greatest) past changes. Using the specified quarterly and annual SEC filings by U.S. corporations from the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) database and corresponding monthly stock returns during 1995 through 2014, they find that:

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