Investing Research Articles

Should investors trust academic equity factor research? In their February 2019 paper entitled “A Census of the Factor Zoo”, Campbell Harvey and Yan Liu announce a comprehensive database of hundreds of equity factors from top academic journals and working papers through January 2019, including a link to citation and download information. They distinguish among six… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 4/1/19 through 4/5/19. 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 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 retail investors rationally account for risks as modeled in academic research when choosing actively managed equity mutual funds? In their March 2019 paper entitled “What Do Mutual Fund Investors Really Care About?”, Itzhak Ben-David, Jiacui Li, Andrea Rossi and Yang Song investigate whether simple, well-known signals explain active mutual fund investor behavior better than… Keep Reading

Have long-short alternative beta (style premium) strategies worked well in practice? In their February 2019 paper entitled “A Decade of Alternative Beta”, Antti Suhonen and Matthias Lennkh use actual performance data to assess alternative beta strategies across asset classes from the end of 2007 through the end of 2017, including quantification of fees and potential… Keep Reading

Does widespread investor acceptance of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) of stock returns drive undervaluation of stocks with low past alphas? In his February 2019 paper entitled “The Unintended Impact of Academic Research on Asset Returns: The CAPM Alpha”, Alex Horenstein examines whether such acceptance distorts the U.S. stock market. Specifically, he each year at the… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked about an annually rebalanced portfolio of 50% stocks and 50% trend following managed futures as recommended in a 2014 Greyserman and Kaminski book [Trend Following with Managed Futures: The Search for Crisis Alpha], suggesting Equinox Campbell Strategy I (EBSIX) as an accessible managed futures fund. To investigate, we consider not only EBSIX… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 3/25/19 through 3/29/19. 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.

A subscriber asked about applying the “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” to the funds available to U.S. federal government employees via the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). To investigate, we test the strategy on the following five funds: G Fund: Government Securities Investment Fund (G) F Fund: Fixed Income Index Investment Fund (F) C Fund: Common Stock Index Investment Fund (C)… Keep Reading

Do momentum (nearest contract 12-month excess return), value (spot price change from one year ago to five years ago) and basis (12-month average ratio of nearest to next-nearest contract prices) commodity futures premiums hold up over the very long run? In their February 2019 paper entitled “Two Centuries of Commodity Futures Premia: Momentum, Value and… Keep Reading