Calendar Effects

Is the value premium seasonal? In their 2012 paper entitled “Is the Value Effect Seasonal? Evidence from Global Equity Markets”, Praveen Kumar Das and Uma Rao investigate the intersection of the January effect and the value premium in stock market indexes around the world. They consider market capitalization-weighted value and growth stock portfolios for the following indexes: Asia Pacific; Europe, Australasia and Far East (EAFE); Europe, with and without UK; Scandinavian countries; UK; U.S.; and, Japan. They define value (growth) stocks as the 30% with the highest (lowest) book-to-market ratios within their respective market indexes. Using monthly stock prices and lagged annual book-to-market ratios for stocks in these markets during 1975 (or inception if unavailable that early) through 2007, they find that: Keep Reading

Do more traders than usual move to the sidelines before long weekends to avoid the risk of bad news during the extended downtime, thereby depressing prices before the weekend and elevating them after with re-entry? To investigate, we analyze the behavior of the S&P 500 Index during the three trading days before and the three trading days after three-day weekends. Using daily closing levels of the S&P 500 Index for 1950-2011 (62 years and 351 three-day weekends), we find that: Keep Reading

Do calendar effects found in stock markets also appear in broad stock index futures? In their November 2011 paper entitled “Calendar Anomalies in Stock Index Futures”, Oscar Carchano and Angel Pardo investigate 188 possible cyclical anomalies in S&P 500, DAX and Nikkei index futures contracts (derived from day-of-the-week, month-of-the-year, weekday-of-the-month, week-of-the-month, semi-month, turn-of-the-month, end-of-year, holidays, semi-month-of-the-year, week-of-the-month-of-the-year, Friday the 13th, Halloween effect and quarterly futures expiration). They note that small trading frictions and ease of shorting promote exploitability of anomalies in futures markets. They assume round trip trading frictions of 0.05% for assessing net profitability. Applying tests not dependent on type of return distribution to stock index futures prices from December 1991 through April 2008, they find that: Keep Reading

Do U.S. stock market returns during the first and last hours of normal trading days reliably indicate what comes next? To investigate, we analyze average SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) returns during 9:30-10:30, 9:30-15:00, 9:30-16:00 and 15:00-16:00 for normal trading days during 2007 (bullish year) and 2008 (bearish year). Using a sample of SPY one-minute prices spanning 2007-2008, we find that: Keep Reading

Does the U.S. stock market exhibit predictable return and volatility patterns during the trading day? To investigate, we analyze one-minute prices for SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) over two recent years. Specifically, we calculate average cumulative return, average returns for 15-minute intervals and average standard deviation of one-minute returns during 15-minute intervals over the trading day during each of 2007 (bullish year) and 2008 (bearish year). Using a sample of SPY one-minute prices for 9:30-16:15 spanning 2007-2008 (over 203,000 observations), we find that: Keep Reading

Is the monthly stock return reversal effect currently exploitable? In the August 2011 version of their paper entitled “New Evidence on Short-Term Reversals in Monthly Stock Returns: Overreaction or Illiquidity?”, Chris Stivers and Licheng Sun investigate the persistence, size-sensitivity and seasonality of monthly stock return reversal in the context of three competing explanations: (1) investor overreaction to news (exploitable); (2) market illiquidity (perhaps unexploitable); and, (3) large stocks lead small stocks (exploitable). They evaluate simple value-weighted and equal-weighted prior-month loser-minus-winner (LMW) strategies based on a sort of prior-month returns, and five more complex equal-weighted LMW strategies based on double-sorts of prior-month returns and market capitalizations. Using monthly return and market capitalization data for a broad sample of U.S. stocks and 30 industries over the period February 1926 through December 2010, they find that: Keep Reading

Do stocks around the world tend to perform better around the time of annual earnings announcements by respective firms than during the rest of the year? In the June 2011 draft of their paper entitled “The Earnings Announcement Premium Around the Globe”, Brad Barber, Emmanuel De George, Reuven Lehavy and Brett Trueman investigate whether the earnings announcement premium (elevated returns during earnings announcement months) is a global phenomenon or is isolated to U.S. stocks. They employ a hedge portfolio, reformed monthly, that is long (short) stocks of firms expected (not expected) to announce annual earnings during the next month, The long and short sides are equal-weighted, and the stocks within each side are value-weighted. Using roughly 200,000 annual earnings announcements for about 28,000 firms in 46 countries during 1990 through 2009 to estimate announcement months during 1991-2010, and associated monthly stock returns, they find that: Keep Reading

Are there recognizable country and global financial cycles over the past half century? If so, what are their characteristics? In their April 2011 paper entitled “Financial Cycles: What? How? When?”, Stijn Claessens, Ayhan Kose and Marco Terrones employ regression models to investigate cycles in credit, housing and equity markets for developed countries since 1960. They define a downturn as peak to trough and an upturn as trough to level of previous peak (not trough to new peak). They define series peaks and troughs with the constraints that complete cycle duration must be at least five quarters and each upturn and downturn must be at least two quarters. The main characteristics of cyclical phases are their duration, amplitude and slope, with crunches/busts (booms) defined as downturns (upturns) in the bottom (top) fourth of all observations. They examine pre-globalization (1960-1985) and globalization (1986-2007) subperiods, with phases globally synchronized (highly synchronized) when more than 40% (50%) of countries experience the same phase. Using quarterly data for aggregate loans to the private sector, house/land price indexes and value-weighted stock market indexes for 21 developed countries over the period 1960 through 2007, seasonally adjusted as necessary, they find that: Keep Reading

Are there reliable ways to exploit differences in asset class returns under Democratic and Republican U.S. presidents? In his April 2011 paper entitled “Is the 60-40 Stock-Bond Pension Fund Rule Wise?”, William Ziemba examines relationships between the U.S. presidential election cycle and long-run returns for several asset classes. Specifically, he investigates the differential performance of large capitalization stocks, small capitalization stocks and bonds when Democrats and Republicans hold the presidency. Using annual asset class return data for 1998 through 2010 to extend prior calculations for 1937-1997 and 1942-1997, he finds that: Keep Reading

In their February 2011 book chapter entitled “Seasonal Anomalies”, Constantine Dzhabarov and William Ziemba describe, update and assess several published U.S. stock market anomalies, most of which are directly or indirectly calendar-driven. They update using returns for stock index futures as a low-friction approach to exploiting calendar anomalies. They acknowledge the possible materiality of data mining/snooping bias in past findings and the difficulty of proving statistical significance even in large samples due to high return variability. Using returns for S&P 500 Index and Russell 2000 Index futures from February 1993 through December 2010 to update analyses of these anomalies, they find that: Keep Reading