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Investing Research Articles

3490 Research Articles

Inherent Misspecification of Factor Models?

Do linear factor model specification choices inherently produce out-of-sample underperformance of investment strategies seeking to exploit factor premiums? In their January 2024 paper entitled “Why Has Factor Investing Failed?: The Role of Specification Errors”, Marcos Lopez de Prado and Vincent Zoonekynd examine whether standard practices induce factor specification errors and how such errors might explain… Keep Reading

FFR Actions, Stock Market Returns and Bond Yields

Do Federal Funds Rate (FFR) actions taken by the Federal Reserve open market operations committee reliably predict stock market and U.S. Treasuries yield reactions? To investigate, we use the S&P 500 Index (SP500) as a proxy for the stock market and the yield for the 10-Year U.S. Constant Maturity Treasury note (T-note). We look at index… Keep Reading

More International Equity Market Granularity for SACEMS?

A subscriber asked whether more granularity in international equity choices for the “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” (SACEMS), such as considered by Decision Moose, would improve performance. To investigate, we augment/replace international developed and emerging equity market exchange-traded funds (ETF) such that the universe of assets becomes: SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) iShares Russell 2000 Index (IWM) iShares… Keep Reading

U.S. Academic Research Extinguishing Global Stock Anomalies?

Does publication of academic studies on stock return anomalies in the U.S. tend to extinguish these anomalies in global markets? In their November 2023 paper entitled “Does U.S. Academic Research Destroy the Predictability of Global Stock Returns?”, Guohao Tang, Yuwei Xie and Lin Zhu compare out-of-sample (post-research sample) and post-publication global returns to research-sample global… Keep Reading

CFO U.S. Economic Sentiment and Stock Market Returns

The quarterly CFO Survey asks chief financial officers, owner-operators, vice presidents and directors of finance, accountants, controllers, treasurers and others with financial decision-making roles in small to very large companies across all major industries to “rate optimism about the overall U.S. economy on a scale from 0 to 100.” Does the average economic sentiment of… Keep Reading

Weekly Summary of Research Findings: 1/22/24 – 1/26/24

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/22/24 through 1/26/24. 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.

Using SVXY to Capture the Volatility Risk Premium

In response to “Shorting VXX with Crash Protection”, which investigates shorting iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures (VXX) to capture the equity volatility risk premium, a subscriber asked about instead using a long position in ProShares Short VIX Short-Term Futures (SVXY). To investigate, we consider two scenarios based on monthly measurements: Buy and Hold –… Keep Reading

How Are Robotics-AI ETFs Doing?

How do exchange-traded-funds (ETF) focused on development of robotics-artificial intelligence (AI), an arguably hot area of technology, perform? To investigate, we consider five of the largest such ETFs, all currently available, as follows: Robo Global Robotics and Automation Index (ROBO) ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics (ARKQ) Global X Robotics & Artificial Intelligence (BOTZ) First Trust… Keep Reading

The State of LLM Use in Accounting and Finance

How might Large Language Models (LLM), trained to understand, generate and interact with human language via billions or trillions of tuned parameters, impact accounting and finance? In their December 2023 paper entitled “A Scoping Review of ChatGPT Research in Accounting and Finance”, Mengming Dong, Theophanis Stratopoulos and Victor Wang synthesize recent publications and working papers… Keep Reading

Long-term SMA and TOTM Combination Strategy

“Turn-of-the-Month Effect Persistence and Robustness” indicates that average absolute returns during the turn-of-the-month (TOTM) are strong for both bull and bear markets. Does a strategy of capturing all bull market returns and TOTM returns only during bear markets perform well? To investigate, we apply four strategies to SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) as a… Keep Reading