Investing Research Articles

Do companies famously known as good places to work outperform as investments? Or, contrarily, do they waste resources keeping employees happy? In his May 2007 paper entitled “Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles? Employee Satisfaction and Equity Prices”, Alex Edmans analyzes the relationship between employee satisfaction and long-term stock performance. He identifies companies with exceptionally satisfied employees via Fortune magazine’s annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work for in America.” Using these lists for 1998-2005 and monthly stock price data for the publicly traded companies in the lists (about 60 per year), he finds that: Keep Reading

Is the value premium so fundamental that its exists generally among stock markets? In their recent paper entitled “Value versus Growth: Australian Evidence”, Philip Gharghori, Sebastian Stryjkowski and Madhu Veeraraghavan test the abilities of indicators based on several alternative definitions of “value” to explain the cross-sectional variation in stock returns in Australia. Specifically, they test book-to-market value ratio (B/M), sales-to-price ratio (S/P), cash flow-to-price ratio (C/P) and earnings-to-price ratio (E/P). They also compare the predictive powers of these value indicators to those of size and debt-to-equity ratio (D/E). Using firm financial data for 1/92-12/04 and associated monthly stock prices for 1/93-12/04 (a total of 137,139 firm-month observations), they find that: Keep Reading

Are “hands-off” (right-leaning) governments better for stocks than “hands-on” (left-leaning) governments? In their recent paper entitled “Investment Returns Under Right- and Left-Wing Governments in Australasia”, Hamish Anderson, Christopher Malone and Ben Marshall examine the effect of ruling party orientation on inflation, and thereby on stock, property and bond returns, in Australia and New Zealand. Using monthly, annual and political-term data as available across the period 1910-2006, they find that: Keep Reading

Technical analysis seeks to exploit stock mispricings derived from postulated investor/trader psychological biases. Does short-term technical analysis actually produce abnormal returns? Or, do its adherents persist based on a misperception that they are to some degree in control of random rewards. In their February 2006 paper entitled “Does Intraday Technical Analysis in the U.S. Equity Market Have Value?”, Ben Marshall, Rochester Cahan and Jared Cahan investigate whether intraday technical analysis is profitable in the overall U.S. equity market. Specifically, they apply a combination of statistically rigorous bootstrapping tests to 7,846 trading rules from five rule families (Filter, Moving Average, Support and Resistance, Channel Breakouts, and On-Balance Volume). Using 5-minute data for Standard and Poor’s Depository Receipts (SPDR) over the period 1/1/02-12/31/03 (encompassing both bear and bull trends), they conclude that: Keep Reading

Do stocks that are difficult to trade (have low liquidity) offer abnormal returns as compensation for the risk of getting out of them? Or, is this reward-for-risk intuition unsound? In their recent paper entitled “Cross-Sectional Stock Returns in the UK Market: the Role of Liquidity Risk”, Soosung Hwang and Chensheng Lu investigate the relationship between liquidity and return for individual stocks, with focus on the link between liquidity and the value premium. They introduce a new measure of liquidity based on the absolute change in stock price per unit of turnover, with turnover calculated as the fraction of firm market capitalization traded. Using price, trading volume, capitalization and fundamentals data for UK stocks over the period 1987-2004, they conclude that: Keep Reading

Stocks with high historical volatility should produce high returns as reward for extra risk. Shouldn’t they? In the April 2007 version of their paper entitled “The Volatility Effect: Lower Risk without Lower Return”, David Blitz and Pim van Vliet examine the relationship between long-term (past three years) historical return volatility and risk-adjusted return for stocks worldwide. Ranking stocks based on historical volatility has some similarity to ranking them based on beta. Using monthly price and fundamental data for a large number of large-capitalization stocks over the period December 1985 through January 2006, they find that: Keep Reading

Does the head-and-shoulders stock price pattern embody investor attitudes that traders can exploit to earn abnormal returns? Or, does it represent an opportunity for the statistics-challenged to be fooled by randomness? In their October 2006 paper entitled “The Predictive Power of ‘Head-and-Shoulders’ Price Patterns in the U.S. Stock Market”, Gene Savin, Paul Weller and Janis Zvingelis use a pattern recognition algorithm, as filtered based on the experience of a technical analyst, to determine whether head-and-shoulders price patterns formed across intervals of 63 trading days have predictive power for future stock returns over the next few months. Using daily price data during 1990-1999 for all stocks in the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 indexes as of June 1990, they conclude that: Keep Reading

Does candlestick technical analysis (examining relationships among opening, high, low and closing prices over the past 1-3 days to identify continuation and reversal signals) generate abnormal returns? In their recent paper entitled “Market Timing with Candlestick Technical Analysis”, Ben Marshall, Martin Young and Lawrence Rose test the profitability of trading stocks included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average based on 28 different candlestick signals. They assume a ten-day holding period after trading at the close on the day after a signal appears. Using stock price data for 1/1/92-12/31/02, they conclude that: Keep Reading

How does “the group that is arguably best qualified, finance professors, …assess the importance of valuation techniques, asset-pricing models, market anomalies, firm characteristics, corporate events, seasonal variables, and other information” when they invest for themselves? In their April 2007 paper entitled “What Really Matters When Buying and Selling Stocks?”, James Doran and Colby Wright seek to answer this question via an email-initiated electronic survey of 4,525 finance professors at accredited U.S. universities and colleges. Using data provided by 642 qualified respondents, all with Ph.D.’s, they conclude that: Keep Reading

How much of a long-term total return advantage do investors perceive for high book-to-market (value) stocks over low book-to-market (growth) stocks? Is this perceived premium stable over time? In their April 2007 paper entitled “The Expected Value Premium”, Long Chen, Ralitsa Petkova and Lu Zhang measure investor expectations for the value premium based on economic fundamentals rather than noisy historical returns. They assume that dividend growth rate equals capital gain rate over long periods, and that the top (bottom) 20% represents a high (low) the book-to-market ratio. Using monthly data for the period 1945-2005, they find that: Keep Reading