Investing Research Articles

“A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation” is a highly influential paper (over 234,000 downloads from SSRN ) about asset allocation based on trend following, with the original version posted in early 2007 and a revision in early 2013. The strategy in that paper applies a 10-month simple moving average (SMA10) timing rule separately to… Keep Reading

What are the roles of changes in earnings forecasts and the discount rate on stock valuation during the COVID-19 stock market crash? In the May 2020 update of their paper entitled “Earnings Expectations in the COVID Crisis”, Augustin Landier and David Thesmar investigate firm-level analyst earnings forecast revisions and discount rate changes as jointly reflected… 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 June 2020.

The home page, Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) and Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy (SACEVS) now show preliminary positions for July 2020. SACEMS rankings are unlikely to change by the close. SACEVS allocations are currently sensitive to yields and S&P 500 Index level, so they may shift a little by the close.

Does multi-class investing boost performance for sophisticated investors such as educational endowments? In his June 2020 paper entitled “Endowment Performance and the Demise of the Multi-Asset-Class Model”, Richard Ennis examines recent performance of educational endowment funds, with focus on allocations to alternative assets. Using performance data from a report on 774 university endowments and from… Keep Reading

Are widely accepted equity factor exposures available in fact to investors via “smart beta” mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETF)? In their May 2020 paper entitled “Smart Beta Made Smart”, Andreas Johansson, Riccardo Sabbatucci and Andrea Tamoni test effectiveness of individual U.S. equity mutual funds and ETFs and combinations of these funds for exploiting several… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/22/20 through 6/26/20. 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.

Is there a way to mitigate adverse impact of price trajectory turning points (trend changes) on performance of intrinsic (absolute or time series) momentum strategies? In their May 2020 paper entitled “Breaking Bad Trends”, Ashish Garg, Christian Goulding, Campbell Harvey and Michele Mazzoleni measure impact of turning points on time series momentum strategy performance across… Keep Reading

Does adding an exchange-traded fund (ETF) or note (ETN) to the Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) boost performance via consideration of more trending/diversifying options? To investigate, we add the following 22 ETF/ETN asset class proxies one at a time to the base set and measure effects on the Top 1, equally weighted (EW)… Keep Reading

Are all of the potentially trending/diversifying asset class proxies used in the Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) necessary? Might one or more of them actually be harmful to performance? To investigate, we each month rank the nine SACEMS assets based on past return with one excluded (nine separate test series) and reform the… Keep Reading