Investing Research Articles

Is data snooping bias a material issue for cross-sectional stock return anomalies published in leading journals? In the September 2017 update of their paper entitled “Publication Bias and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns”, Andrew Chen and Tom Zimmermann: (1) develop an estimator for anomaly data snooping bias based on noisiness of associated returns; (2) apply it to replications… Keep Reading

Do dual-sorts of country stock market predictive factors add value to single-sorts? In the July 2015 version of his paper entitled “Combining Equity Country Selection Strategies” Adam Zaremba first re-examines earnings-price ratio (E/P), momentum (return from 12 months ago to one month ago), skewness (based on the last 24 monthly returns) and turnover ratio (average monthly turnover for the… Keep Reading

Is the Fama-French five-factor (market, size, book-to-market, profitability, investment) model of stock returns optimal? In the September 2015 draft of their paper entitled “Choosing Factors”, Eugene Fama and Kenneth French investigate potential improvements to the overall predictive power of their five-factor model. Specifically, they examine: Using a profitability factor based on cash rather than operating profit, or substituting a… Keep Reading

Are there plenty of exchange-traded funds (ETF) offering positive or negative exposures to widely accepted factor premiums? In his February 2017 paper entitled “Are Exchange-Traded Funds Harvesting Factor Premiums?”, David Blitz analyzes the exposures of U.S. equity ETFs to market, size, value, momentum and volatility factors. Specifically, he calculates factor betas (exposures) from a multi-factor regression… Keep Reading

Do widely accepted equity factor premiums exist in data older than generally employed in academic studies? In their November 2021 paper entitled “The Cross-Section of Stock Returns before 1926 (And Beyond)”, Guido Baltussen, Bart van Vliet and Pim van Vliet look for some of the most widely accepted factor premiums in a newly assembled sample… Keep Reading

Are their practical ways to suppress the sometimes large reduction in academic (gross) equity factor premiums due to trading frictions and other implementation obstacles? In their March 2023 paper entitled “Smart Rebalancing”, Robert Arnott, Feifei Li and Juhani Linnainmaa first examine the performance and related turnover of seven long-only factor premiums: annually reformed (end of… Keep Reading

Should investors focus on global equity factors or local (country) equity factors when trying to predict their local market returns? In their November 2023 paper entitled “How Global is Predictability? The Power of Financial Transfer Learning”, Oliver Hellum, Lasse Heje Pedersen and Anders Rønn-Nielsen compare the importance of global factors versus local factors for predicting… Keep Reading

What combination of factors best predicts stock market returns at a monthly frequency? In the October 2015 draft of their paper entitled “Comparing Asset Pricing Models”, Francisco Barillas and Jay Shanken apply a Bayesian procedure to compare all possible pricing models based on subsets of a given set of pricing factors. They consider a total of ten factors: market, two versions… Keep Reading

Does global diversification improve smart beta (equity factor) investing strategies? In their September 2017 paper entitled “Diversification Strikes Again: Evidence from Global Equity Factors”, Jay Binstock, Engin Kose and Michele Mazzoleni examine effects of global diversification on equity factor hedge portfolios. They consider five factors: High-Minus-low Value (HML) – book equity divided by market capitalization. Small-Minus-Big Size (SMB) – market… Keep Reading

Does transient factor popularity drive factor/smart beta portfolio performance by pushing valuations of associated stocks up and down? In their February 2016 paper entitled “How Can ‘Smart Beta’ Go Horribly Wrong?”, Robert Arnott, Noah Beck, Vitali Kalesnik and John West examine degrees to which factor hedge portfolio and stock factor tilt (smart beta) backtests are attractive due… Keep Reading