Investing Research Articles

…recent S&P 500 aggregate bottoms-up earnings growth estimates have often been highly variable and substantially inaccurate.

Research (see “Asset Growth Rate as a Return Indicator” and “Asset Growth a Bad Sign for Stocks Everywhere?”) indicates that stocks of firms with high asset growth rates tend subsequently to underperform the market. Does this finding translate to the overall stock market? In the April 2014 version of his paper entitled “Asset Growth and Stock Market Returns:… Keep Reading

Are sentiments conveyed in Seeking Alpha articles useful for stock picking? In their January 2023 paper entitled “Seeking Alpha: More Sophisticated Than Meets the Eye”, Duo Selina Pei, Abhinav Anand and Xing Huan apply two-pass natural language processing to test the informativeness of articles from Seeking Alpha incremental to publicly available earnings data. Specifically, they… Keep Reading

How accurate are consensus firm earnings forecasts worldwide at a 12-month horizon? In his May 2016 paper entitled “An Empirical Study of Financial Analysts Earnings Forecast Accuracy”, Andrew Stotz measures accuracy of consensus 12-month earnings forecasts by financial analysts for the companies they cover around the world. He defines consensus as the average for analysts coverings… Keep Reading

Why does the coincident relationship between U.S. aggregate corporate earnings growth and stock market return change from negative in older research to positive in recent research? In their January 2020 paper entitled “Assessing the Structural Change in the Aggregate Earnings-Returns Relation”, Asher Curtis, Chang‐Jin Kim and Hyung Il Oh examine when the change in the… Keep Reading

Does “meaningful” short-term stock return momentum predict exploitable short-term price trends? In their October 2015 paper entitled “News Momentum”, Hao Jiang, Sophia Li  and Hao Wang combine time-stamped firm news with high-frequency (15-minute) stock returns to identify stocks exhibiting news-driven momentum. Their news feed is the stream of unique items (no repeated stories) delivered in near real time by RavenPack. News-driven momentum derives from high-frequency returns… Keep Reading

Do employees of financial intermediaries such as brokers, financial analysts and fund managers take advantage of their access to private information? In their March 2018 paper entitled “Personal Trading by Brokers, Analysts, and Fund Managers”, Henk Berkman, Paul Koch and Joakim Westerholm examine the personal trading of employees at Finnish financial intermediaries (experts) who have regular access to material… Keep Reading

Do “bubble” stocks (those with high shorting demand and small borrowing supply) exhibit unconventional momentum behaviors? In their December 2018 paper entitled “Overconfidence, Information Diffusion, and Mispricing Persistence”, Kent Daniel, Alexander Klos and Simon Rottke examine how momentum effects for bubble stocks differ from conventional momentum effects. They each month sort stocks into groups independently as follows:… Keep Reading

…evidence indicates that aggregate earnings alone are not a useful predictor of overall stock market behavior, but firm-level (highly segmented industry) earnings are useful for predicting returns of individual stocks (highly segmented industries).

…neither change in aggregate earnings nor the inflation rate alone is a good concurrent indicator for the overall stock market returns on a quarterly basis. However, because earnings growth and inflation are interrelated, they may together help forecast stock market behavior.