How should researchers address the issue of aggregate/cumulative data snooping bias, which derives from many researchers exploring approximately the same data over time? In the October 2014 version of their paper entitled “. . ....
Does compounding rules tend to improve the performance of stock-picking strategies? In the October 2014 draft of their paper entitled “Does Complexity Imply Value, AAII Value Strategies from 1963 to 2013”, Wesley Gray, Jack Vogel and Yang Xu compare 13...
Is more clearly better in terms of number of factors included in a stock screening strategy? In the October 2014 draft of their paper entitled “Incremental Variables and the Investment Opportunity Set”, Eugene Fama and Kenneth French...
Are the widely used Fama-French three-factor model (market, size, book-to-market ratio) and the Carhart four-factor model (adding momentum) the best factor models of stock returns? In their September 2014 paper entitled “Digesting Anomalies: An Investment Approach”, Kewei Hou, Chen...
Does the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) make predictions useful to investors? In his October 2014 paper entitled “CAPM: an Absurd Model”, Pablo Fernandez argues that the assumptions and predictions of CAPM have no basis in the...
Can the U.S. stock market continue to deliver its historical return? In the preliminary draft of his paper entitled “A Pragmatist’s Guide to Long-run Equity Returns, Market Valuation, and the CAPE”, John Golob poses two...
How much distortion can data snooping inject into expected investment strategy performance? In their October 2014 paper entitled “Statistical Overfitting and Backtest Performance”, David Bailey, Stephanie Ger, Marcos Lopez de Prado, Alexander Sim and Kesheng Wu...
What’s the latest research on portfolio construction and risk management? In the the introduction to the July 2014 version of his (book-length) paper entitled “Many Risks, One (Optimal) Portfolio”, Cristian Homescu states: “The main focus of...
A reader inquired about the validity of Martin Zweig’s Four Percent Model, which states (from pages 93-94 of the 1994 version of Martin Zweig’s Winning on Wall Street): “The Four Percent Model for the stock...
Do U.S. television events that draw large attentive audiences have an effect on the stock prices of main corporate sponsors? In the September 2014 version of his paper entitled “Investor Attention and Stock Prices: Evidence from a...
In the preface to his 2015 book entitled Dual Momentum Investing: An Innovative Strategy for Higher Returns with Lower Risk, author Gary Antonacci states: “We need a way to earn long-term above-market returns while limiting our downside exposure....
How do commodity futures behave in the post-financialization era, with commodities easily accessible via exchange-traded instruments and futures? In their September 2014 paper entitled “Factor Structure in Commodity Futures Return and Volatility”, Peter Christoffersen, Asger Lunde and Kasper...
Is there a simple way to tell whether a commodity is overvalued or undervalued? In his May 2014 presentation package entitled “Commodity ‘CAPE Ratios'”, Claude Erb looks at long-term real commodity prices as valuation “crutches” to estimate when...
S&P 500 Index options data imply expected S&P 500 Index volatility (VIX) over the next month. In turn, VIX futures options data imply expected volatility of VIX (VVIX) over the next month. Does VVIX predict stock...
Do hedge fund-like mutual funds work like hedge funds? In his September 2014 paper entitled “Hedge Funds versus Mutual Funds (2): An Examination of Multialternative Mutual Funds”, David McCarthy evaluates mutual funds categorized by Morningstar as “multialternative” after...
Does adjusting an asset allocation retirement glidepath according to a stock market valuation metric such as Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio (CAPE ratio or P/E10) improve the outcome? In their September 2014 paper entitled “Retirement...
“Intraday U.S. Stock Market Behavior” examines behavior of the S&P 500 Index at 15-minute intervals over the trading day during each of 2007 (bullish year) and 2008 (bearish year), finding slight tendencies for market weakness...
How successful are active equity mutual fund managers in timing their domestic markets worldwide? In their August 2014 paper entitled “Market Timing Around the World”, Javier Vidal-Garcia, Marta Vidal and Duc Khuong Nguyen employ daily returns to measure the effectiveness...
Is the return on CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index (VIX) futures predictable? In his preliminary paper entitled “The Expected Return of Fear”, Ing-Haw Cheng investigates whether the relationship between VIX futures prices and VIX level predicts the return on...
A subscriber proposed a simple test of the concept underlying the First Trust Dorsey Wright Focus 5 ETF (FV). This exchange-traded fund (ETF) intends to track the Dorsey Wright Focus Five Index, an equally weighted and...
The deadline for submission of papers for the 2015 Charles H. Dow Award, presented by the Market Technicians Association (MTA), is January 5, 2015. MTA established this award in 1994 to recognize outstanding research in technical analysis....
Are changes in the money supply usefully predictive of stock market behavior? In his September 2014 paper entitled “Does Money Supply Growth Contain Predictive Power for Stock Returns?”, David McMillan investigates whether changes in U.S. money supply reliably...
Do stock pairs that track in the past reliably track in the future? In his January 2014 paper entitled “On the Persistence of Cointegration in Pairs Trading”, Matthew Clegg assesses the persistence of cointegration among pairs of...
Are there times when investors should avoid low-volatility stocks? In their August 2014 paper entitled “Tactical Timing of Low Volatility Equity Strategies”, Sanne De Boer and James Norman investigate which factors predict the performance of low-volatility...
Is the Turn-of-the-Month (TOTM) effect globally ubiquitous and persistent? In his August 2014 paper entitled “The Turn-of-The-Month-Effect: Evidence from Periodic Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (PGARCH) Model”, Eleftherios Giovanis examines the TOTM effect in 20 country stock...