Investing Research Articles

How do the major crypto-assets (Bitcoin, Ripple, and Ethereum) stack up against conventional asset classes? In their August 2018 paper entitled “Risks and Returns of Cryptocurrency”, Yukun Liu and Aleh Tsyvinski apply standard tools of asset pricing to measure crypto-asset exposures to: 160 equity factors. Macroeconomic factors (non-durable consumption growth, durable consumption growth, industrial production growth, and… Keep Reading

Does focusing on downside risk (volatility or beta) consistently produce more accurate forecasts of asset returns? In their July 2018 paper entitled “Tail Risk in the Cross Section of Alternative Risk Premium Strategies”, Bernd Scherer and Nick Baltas investigate how well downside risk explains cross-sectional returns of 260 risk factor strategies spanning asset classes and investment styles… Keep Reading

Are premium toys attractive alternative investments? In their April 2018 paper entitled “LEGO – The Toy of Smart Investors”, Victoria Dobrynskaya and Julia Kishilova study LEGO sets as an alternative investment. A secondary market for these sets with 10,000+ daily transactions, affordable to any retail investor, has evolved since 2000. Brickpicker.com tracks prices for each set (either new… Keep Reading

How should investors feel about factor/multi-factor investing? In their February 2019 paper entitled “Alice’s Adventures in Factorland: Three Blunders That Plague Factor Investing”, Robert Arnott, Campbell Harvey, Vitali Kalesnik and Juhani Linnainmaa explore three critical failures of U.S. equity factor investing: Returns are far short of expectations due to overfitting and/or trade crowding. Drawdowns far exceed expectations. Diversification of… Keep Reading

Do assets other than individual stocks exhibit a short-term (1-month) reversal effect? In their February 2019 paper entitled “Short-Term Momentum (Almost) Everywhere”, Adam Zaremba, Andreas Karathanasopoulos and Huaigang Long investigate short-term return predictability within long run global samples spanning five asset classes: equity indexes, government bonds, treasury bills, commodity futures and currencies. Each month they… Keep Reading

Do returns for equity factors (long stocks with high expected returns and short stocks with low expected returns based on some firm/stock trading characteristic) broadly and reliably exhibit momentum? In other words, do factors with strong (weak) returns in recent months have strong (weak) returns next month? In the February 2019 revision of their paper… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/17/19 through 6/21/19. 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.

Do most stocks worldwide beat the risk-free rate of return? In their July 2019 paper entitled “Do Global Stocks Outperform US Treasury Bills?”, Hendrik Bessembinder, Te-Feng Chen, Goeun Choi and John Wei  compare returns of individual global common stocks to that of 1-month U.S. Treasury bills (T-bills). They screen stock price data for obvious errors… Keep Reading

Does the term premium as measured by returns to zero-coupon U.S. Treasury notes (T-notes) concentrate during some part of the monthly cycle? In their August 2019 paper entitled “Predictable End-of-Month Treasury Returns”, Jonathan Hartley and Krista Schwarz examine the monthly cycle of excess returns on 2-year, 5-year and 10-year T-notes. Specifically, they calculate average excess… Keep Reading

Is retail trading a reliable driver of U.S. stock momentum? In his November 2019 paper entitled “Retail Trading and Momentum Profitability”, Douglas Chung investigates interactions across stocks between current proportion of retail trading and future momentum returns. Specifically, for each month and for each of two recent stock samples, he: Sorts stocks into fifths (quintiles)… Keep Reading