Investing Research Articles

Are firms that engage the public via Twitter more expanding (via exposure) or shrinking (via adverse social media frenzy) their opportunity sets? In their January 2020 paper entitled “The Social Media Risk Premium”, Amin Hosseini, Gergana Jostova, Alexander Philipov and Robert Savickas investigate relationships between firm Twitter activity and stock return. Their data include firm… Keep Reading

Does return distribution skewness predict relative performance of assets across asset classes? In their December 2019 paper entitled “Cross-Asset Skew”, Nick Baltas and Gabriel Salinas investigate realized skewness as a relative return predictor within and across four asset classes (equity indexes, government bonds, currencies and commodities). Specifically, at the end of each month, they: For… Keep Reading

Can investors exploit information about hedge fund stock holdings in SEC Form 13F filings? In their October 2019 paper entitled “Systematic 13F Hedge Fund Alpha”, Mobeen Iqbal, Farouk Jivraj and Luca Angelini investigate whether carefully culled “best ideas” of equity hedge funds produce significantly beat the S&P 500 Total Return (TR) Index. Using quarterly Form… Keep Reading

Are there relationships between (1) the stock market outlook expressed by a U.S. equity mutual fund manager in semi-annual reports and (2) positioning and performance of that fund? In his October 2019 preliminary paper entitled “Are Professional Investors Prone to Behavioral Biases? Evidence from Mutual Fund Managers”, Mehran Azimi examines these relationships. Specifically, for each… Keep Reading

Does careful accounting for transitory expenses in SEC Form 10-Ks provide a better view of future firm/stock performance than that provided by Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP) earnings per share (EPS)? In their October 2019 paper entitled “Core Earnings: New Data and Evidence”, Ethan Rouen, Eric So and Charles Wang define Core Earnings, which adds… Keep Reading

Can investors identify stocks that incorporate news slowly enough to allow exploitation? In their August 2019 paper entitled “Tomorrow’s Fish and Chip Paper? Slowly Incorporated News and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns”, Ran Tao, Chris Brooks and Adrian Bell classify stocks incorporating news quickly (QI) or slowly (SI) into prices and investigate implications for associated… Keep Reading

What should investors expect to see in a typical investment advisor’s model portfolio? In their July 2019 paper entitled “Factors and Advisors Portfolios”, Brian Lawler, Andrew Ang, Brett Mossman and Patrick Nolan examine patterns and factor exposures in detailed holdings for a large number of model portfolios from many types of investment advisors. When holdings… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/24/19 through 6/28/19. 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 straightforward way to model the returns on U.S. Corporate bond indexes? In his April 2019 paper entitled “Give Credit Where Credit is Due: What Explains Corporate Bond Returns?”, Roni Israelov models returns on these indexes based on four intuitive factors: Positive exposure to government bond yields, quantified via duration-matched government bonds. Negative… Keep Reading

Do equity strategy portfolios characterized by aggressive (conservative) scaling when portfolio volatility is recently low (high) reliably beat unmanaged performance? In their March 2019 paper entitled “On the Performance of Volatility-Managed Portfolios”, Scott Cederburg, Michael O’Doherty, Feifei Wang and Xuemin Yan assess whether practical volatility management is systematically attractive. For each of 103 anomalies (nine… Keep Reading