Investing Research Articles

Are the backtests provided for alternative beta investment products representative of their future live performance? In their March 2016 paper entitled “Quantifying Backtest Overfitting in Alternative Beta Strategies”, Antti Suhonen, Matthias Lennkh and Fabrice Perez compare the backtested and live performances of alternative beta products offered by investment banks. The strategies underlying these products are formulaic and non-discretionary, designed to extract… Keep Reading

Is there a unique stock risk factor associated with expectations of a bear market? In the November 2016 version of their paper entitled “Bear Beta”, Zhongjin Lu and Scott Murray relate a put option-based indicator of the risk that the U.S. equity market will enter a bear state to individual stock returns. This indicator is based on two… Keep Reading

Do specific stocks react differently to economic uncertainty? In their December 2016 paper entitled “Is Economic Uncertainty Priced in the Cross-Section of Stock Returns?”, Turan Bali, Stephen Brown and Yi Tang investigate the role of economic uncertainty in the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. They measure economic uncertainty monthly as an aggregation of the volatilities of the unpredictable components… Keep Reading

Do stocks with expectations of high capital expenditures (growth opportunities) outperform those with expectations of low capital expenditures? In their December 2016 paper entitled “Expected Investment Growth and the Cross Section of Stock Returns”, Jun Li and Huijun Wang examine the power of expected investment growth (EIG) to predict cross-sectional stock returns. They construct EIG for each stock… Keep Reading

Can investors predict the return of a stock from its relationship with the dispersion of returns across all stocks? In their May 2017 paper entitled “Building Efficient Portfolios Sensitive to Market Volatility”, Wei Liu, James Kolari and Jianhua Huang examine a 2-factor model which predicts the return on a stock based on its sensitivity to (1) the value-weighted stock market… Keep Reading

How many factors are optimal for modeling future returns of individual stocks? How do these factors relate to conventionally used factors (market, size, value, momentum, investment, profitability…)? In the June 2016 version of their paper entitled “Multifactor Models and the APT: Evidence from a Broad Cross-Section of Stock Returns”, Ilan Cooper, Paulo Maio and Dennis Philip derive… Keep Reading

Do individual stocks react differently and persistently to aggregate investor mood changes? In their December 2016 paper entitled “Mood Beta and Seasonalities in Stock Returns”, David Hirshleifer, Danling Jiang and Yuting Meng investigate whether some stocks have higher sensitivities to investor mood changes (higher mood betas) than others, thereby inducing calendar effects in the cross-section of returns…. Keep Reading

How does a large sample of stock return anomalies fare in recent replication testing? In their October 2018 paper entitled “Replicating Anomalies”, Kewei Hou, Chen Xue and Lu Zhang attempt to replicate 452 published U.S. stock return anomalies, including 57, 69, 38, 79, 103, and 106 anomalies 57 momentum, 69 value-growth, 38 investment, 79 profitability, 103 intangibles and 106… Keep Reading

Does an asset class breadth rule work better than a class-by-class exclusion rule for momentum strategy crash protection? In their July 2017 paper entitled “Breadth Momentum and Vigilant Asset Allocation (VAA): Winning More by Losing Less”, Wouter Keller and Jan Keuning introduce VAA as a dual momentum asset class strategy aiming at returns above 10% with drawdowns… Keep Reading

How serious is the snooping bias (p-hacking) derived from brute force mining of stock trading strategy variations? In their August 2017 paper entitled “p-Hacking: Evidence from Two Million Trading Strategies”, Tarun Chordia, Amit Goyal and Alessio Saretto test a large number of hypothetical trading strategies to estimate an upper bound on the seriousness of p-hacking and to estimate the… Keep Reading