Investing Research Articles

Are the returns of factors widely used to predict the cross-section of stock returns themselves predictable? In the January 2016 draft of his paper entitled “Equity Factor Predictability”, Ulrich Carl analyzes predictability of market, size (market capitalization), value (book-to-market ratio), momentum (returns from 12 months ago to one month ago), low beta (betting against beta) and quality… Keep Reading

Should investors shun mutual funds with high fees? In their February 2017 paper entitled “Cheaper is Not Better: On the Superior Performance of High-Fee Mutual Funds”, Jinfei Sheng, Mikhail Simutin and Terry Zhang re-examine the conventionally accepted negative relationship between expense ratio and future net performance of actively managed equity mutual funds. They measure fund performance as alpha from each… Keep Reading

Do factor models predict returns for corporate bonds as they do for stocks? In their October 2014 paper entitled “Factor Investing in the Corporate Bond Market”, Patrick Houweling and Jeroen van Zundert develop and test a four-factor (size, low-risk, value and momentum) model of future corporate bond returns. Each month for investment grade and high yield bond market segments… Keep Reading

Do technical trend trading/intrinsic momentum strategies work for widely used equity factors such as size (small minus big market capitalizations), value (high minus low book-to-market ratios), profitability (robust minus weak), investment (conservative minus aggressive) and momentum (winners minus losers)? In their January 2018 paper entitled “What Goes up Must Not Come Down – Time Series… Keep Reading

The many factor-based indexes and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that track them now available enable investors to construct multi-factor portfolios piecemeal. Is such piecemeal construction suboptimal? In their July 2018 paper entitled “The Characteristics of Factor Investing”, David Blitz and Milan Vidojevic apply a multi-factor expected return linear regression model to explore behaviors of long-only factor portfolios. They consider six factors: value-weighted… Keep Reading

Are equity sector and factor investing complementary? In their May 2017 paper entitled “Factors vs. Sectors in Asset Allocation: Stronger Together?”, Marie Briere and Ariane Szafarz compare efficient sector investing (diversifying economic risks) and efficient factor investing (diversifying across risk factors) for U.S. stocks, and then assess advantages of combining the two approaches. They first construct two efficient… Keep Reading

Do published stock factors exhibit performance streaks exploitable via intrinsic (absolute, or time series) and relative (cross-sectional) momentum? In the March 2021 revision of their paper entitled “Factor Momentum and the Momentum Factor”, Sina Ehsani and Juhani Linnainmaa investigate stock factor portfolio monthly time series and cross-sectional momentum. They consider 15 factors for U.S. stocks… Keep Reading

Which equity factor model is best among non-U.S. global stock markets? In other words, what market/accounting variables are most important to investors screening non-U.S. stocks? In his February 2020 paper entitled “A Comparison of Global Factor Models”, Matthias Hanauer compares eight widely used equity factor models on a common dataset spanning stocks from 47 non-U.S…. Keep Reading

Is diversification across stock and bond factors superior to diversification across asset classes? In their August 2013 report entitled “Investing in Systematic Factor Premiums”, Kees Koedijk, Alfred Slager and Philip Stork measure the gross performances of widely used stock and bond factors and pit portfolios diversified across those factors against portfolios diversified across asset classes. For… Keep Reading

Does stock momentum purified of market, size and book-to-market factor risks (idiosyncratic or residual or pure momentum) distinctly outperform conventional momentum? In their April 2017 paper entitled “The Idiosyncratic Momentum Anomaly”, David Blitz, Matthias Hanauer and Milan Vidojevic revisit idiosyncratic past stock return as a return predictor. They specify conventional momentum as total return from 12 months ago… Keep Reading