November 16, 2018
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 11/12/18 through 11/16/18. 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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November 16, 2018
Can investors time premiums associated with widely used stock/firm fundamental ratios? In their September 2018 paper entitled “It Takes Two to Tango: Fundamental Timing in Stock Market”, Fuwei Jiang, Xinlin Qi, Guohao Tang and Nan Huang use a simple moving average (SMA) trend indicator to time premiums associated with four fundamental stock/firm ratios: book-to-market (BM), earnings-to-price (EP), gross profitability (GP), and return-on-assets (ROA). In calculating these ratios, they lag accounting variables by six months to avoid look-ahead bias. For each ratio, they:
As benchmarks, they each year buy and hold four portfolios that are each long (short) the value-weighted deciles with the highest (lowest) expected returns for one of the fundamental ratios. While focusing on a 20-day SMA, for robustness they also test SMAs of 10, 50, 100 and 200 trading days. While focusing on value weighting, they also look at equal weighting. They run tests on both non-financial Chinese A-share stocks and non-financial U.S. common stocks. Using annual groomed fundamentals data and daily returns for Chinese stocks during January 2001-December 2017 and for U.S. stocks during July 1970-December 2017, and contemporaneous Treasury bill yields, they find that:
November 15, 2018
Does the Thanksgiving holiday, a time of families celebrating plenty, give U.S. stock investors a sense of optimism that translates into stock returns? To investigate, we analyze the historical behavior of the S&P 500 Index during the three trading days before and the three trading days after the holiday. Using daily closing levels of the S&P 500 Index for 1950-2017 (68 events), we find that: Keep Reading
November 14, 2018
The Inflation Forecast now incorporates actual total and core Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for October 2018. The actual total (core) inflation rate for September is higher than (the same as) forecasted.
November 14, 2018
Each month, the Census Bureau announces and the financial media report U.S. new home sales as a potential indicator of future U.S. stock market returns. Release date is about three weeks after the month being reported. Moreover, new releases may substantially revise recent past releases, so that the Census Bureau historical data set effectively has a longer lag. Does this economic indicator convey useful information about future returns for the broad U.S. stock market or for Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT)? To investigate, we relate returns for the S&P 500 Index (SP500) and for the FTSE NAREIT All REITs total return index (REITs) to changes in new home sales at the monthly release frequency. Using monthly data for SP500 and for seasonally adjusted annualized new homes sales starting January 1963, and for REITs starting December 1971, all through September 2018, we find that: Keep Reading
November 13, 2018
Each month, the Census Bureau announces and the financial media report U.S. housing starts as a potential indicator of future U.S. stock market returns. Release date is about two weeks after the month being reported. New releases may substantially revise recent past releases, so that the Census Bureau historical data set effectively has a longer lag. Does this economic indicator convey useful information about future returns for the broad U.S. stock market or for Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT)? To investigate, we relate returns for the S&P 500 Index (SP500)and for the FTSE NAREIT All REITs total return index (REITs) to changes in housing starts at the monthly release frequency. Using monthly data for SP500 and for seasonally adjusted annualized housing starts starting January 1959, and for REITs starting December 1971, all through September 2018, we find that:
November 12, 2018
Which economic variables are most important for predicting stock returns? In their October 2018 paper entitled “Sparse Macro Factors”, David Rapach and Guofu Zhou apply machine learning to isolate via sparse principal component analysis (PCA) which of 120 economic variables from the FRED-MD database most influence stocks. These variables span output/income, labor market, housing, consumption, orders/inventories, money/credit, yields/exchange rates and inflation. As a preliminary step, they adjust raw economic variables by, where necessary: (1) transforming them to produce stationary series; (2) adjusting for reporting lags of one or two months. They next execute sparse PCA, which sets small component weights to zero, thereby facilitating interpretation of results without sacrificing much predictive power. For comparison, they also extract the first 10 conventional principal components from the same variables. Finally, they use 202 stock portfolios to estimate the influence of sparse and conventional principal components on the cross section of stock returns. Using monthly data for the 120 economic variables and 202 stock portfolios during February 1960 through June 2018, they find that:
November 9, 2018
Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 11/5/18 through 11/9/18. 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
November 9, 2018
Do intraday U.S. stock returns still tend to reverse preceding overnight returns as found in prior research? In their August 2018 paper entitled “Overnight Return, the Invisible Hand Behind The Intraday Return? A Retrospective”, Ben Branch and Aixin Ma revisit prior research on the relationship between overnight and intraday returns of U.S. stocks. Specifically, they relate average intraday stock returns to preceding average overnight returns based on: (1) whether average overnight returns are positive or negative; and, (2) by ranked fourths (quartiles) of average overnight returns. They perform a separate regression analysis to isolate correlation effects among overnight, intraday and one-leg lagged overnight and intraday returns. Using daily open-to-close and close-to-open returns for a broad sample of U.S. stocks during January 2011 through December 2017, they find that: Keep Reading
November 8, 2018
Will equity funds “managed” by artificial intelligence (AI) outperform human investors? To investigate, we consider the performance of AI Powered Equity ETF (AIEQ), which “seeks to provide investment results that exceed broad U.S. Equity benchmark indices at equivalent levels of volatility.” More specifically, offeror EquBot: “…leverages IBM’s Watson AI to conduct an objective, fundamental analysis of U.S.-listed common stocks and real estate investment trusts…based on up to ten years of historical data and apply that analysis to recent economic and news data. Each day, the EquBot Model ranks each company based on the probability of the company benefiting from current economic conditions, trends, and world events and identifies approximately 30 to 70 companies with the greatest potential over the next twelve months for appreciation and their corresponding weights, while maintaining volatility…comparable to the broader U.S. equity market. The Fund may invest in the securities of companies of any market capitalization. The EquBot model recommends a weight for each company based on its potential for appreciation and correlation to the other companies in the Fund’s portfolio. The EquBot model limits the weight of any individual company to 10%.” We use SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) as a simple benchmark for AIEQ performance. Using daily dividend-adjusted closes of AIEQ and SPY from AIEQ inception (October 18, 2017) through October 2018, we find that: Keep Reading