Investing Research Articles

Does a simple countercyclical (contrarian) asset class allocation rule work well, wherein an investor assumes that a relatively high aggregate allocation to an asset class signals relatively low/risky future returns for that class? In his February 2016 paper entitled “Understanding Modern Portfolio Construction”, Cullen Roche reviews the principles of investing and portfolio construction and examines a… Keep Reading

In the introductory text for Part I of their 2016 book, Adaptive Asset Allocation: Dynamic Global Porfolios to Profit in Good Times – and Bad, Adam Butler, Michael Philbrick and Rodrigo Gordillo state: “…we have come to stand for something square and real, a true Iron Law of Wealth Management: We would rather lose half our clients during a raging… Keep Reading

Should investors trust retirement planning tools that are publicly available on financial websites? In their February 2016 paper entitled “The Efficacy of Publicly-Available Retirement Planning Tools”, Taft Dorman, Barry Mulholland, Qianwen Bi and Harold Evensky: Identify via theoretical analysis and a survey of financial professionals the demographic, financial and economic variables important as inputs to retirement planning. Assess… Keep Reading

How should investors assess the risk of financial advisor misconduct? In their March 2016 paper entitled “The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct”, Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru investigate the recent extent of misconduct among registered financial advisors (“advisors”) and financial advisory firms in the U.S. Their data include employment history, customer disputes, disclosed investigations and disciplinary events (civil, criminal… Keep Reading

Can individual investors easily mimic the asset allocation strategies, and thereby the returns, of university endowments? In his March 2016 paper entitled “Invest Like an Endowment”, Drew Knowles reviews the asset allocation policies and resultant investment returns of those college and university endowments who volunteer such data to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). He… Keep Reading

What happens out-of-sample to stock portfolios with weights derived from extreme in-sample fitting? In their February 2016 paper entitled “Stock Portfolio Design and Backtest Overfitting”, David Bailey, Jonathan Borwein and Marcos Lopez de Prado examine backtest overfitting in the context of designing a stock portfolio/fund. Their test approach is: Construct split-adjusted, dividend-reinvested price series for all S&P 500 components as of January 22,… Keep Reading

Is Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio (CAPE or P/E10) a better predictor of long-term stock market performance than other valuation ratios? In his January 2016 paper entitled “Predicting Stock Market Returns Using the Shiller CAPE — An Improvement Towards Traditional Value Indicators?”, Norbert Keimling first examines whether reduced dividend payout, new accounting standards and structural changes to key stock indexes… Keep Reading

How can investors easily estimate the degradation from optimized in-sample Sharpe ratio to out-of-sample expected Sharpe ratio? In their February 2016 paper entitled “Noise Fit, Estimation Error and a Sharpe Information Criterion”, Dirk Paulsen and Jakob Sohl derive a simple correction for the upward bias in an optimized in-sample Sharpe ratio. The upward bias derives from fitting: (1) random… Keep Reading

A subscriber suggested evaluating Sentdex Sentiment Trading Signals. These signals attempt to derive the emotion of a current body of text (over 20 sources, mainly Reuters, Bloomberg, WSJ, LA Times, CNBC, Forbes, Business Insider and Yahoo Finance) regarding financial assets such as individual stocks and stock indexes. Signal values are 24-hour averages, ranging from -3 (strongest negative) to… Keep Reading

How well do mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETF) designed to track hedge fund indexes work? In their October 2015 paper entitled “Synthetic Hedge Funds”, Mario Fischer, Matthias Hanauer and Robert Heigermoser examine the performance of synthetic hedge funds, defined as open-end mutual funds and ETFs that explicitly employ hedge fund indexes as their primary benchmarks. They assess replication success:… Keep Reading