Investing Research Articles

Do funds based on holdings/trades of members of the U.S. Congress and their families beat the market? To investigate, we look at performances of two recently introduced exchange-traded funds (ETF): Unusual Whales Subversive Democratic Trading ETF (NANC) – invests primarily in stocks held by Democratic members of Congress and/or their families per public disclosure filings…. Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/9/25 through 6/13/25. 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.

How well do the short-term stock picks of publicly available artificial intelligence (AI) platforms perform? To investigate, we asked Grok, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Meta AI the following questions on April 20, 2025: Please succinctly provide your unique best long idea for the next 30 days. Please succinctly provide your unique best shorting idea for… Keep Reading

Should investors, particularly those employing machine learning, prefer complex or simple prediction models? In the May 2025 revision of his paper entitled “Simplified: A Closer Look at the Virtue of Complexity in Return Prediction”, Daniel Buncic challenges prior research finding that portfolio performance (Sharpe ratio) increases with machine learning model complexity when the number of… Keep Reading

What are current estimates of equity risk premiums (ERP) and risk-free rates around the world? In their May 2025 paper entitled “Survey: Market Risk Premium and Risk-Free Rate Used for 54 countries in 2025”, Pablo Fernandez, Diego Garcia and Lucia Acin summarize results of an April 2025 email survey of international finance and economic professors,… Keep Reading

How much should investors who hold a conventionally diversified portfolio (stocks and bonds) be willing to pay for and an additional equity or bond fund that outperforms its benchmark (provides alpha)? In their May 2025 paper entitled “How Much Should You Pay for Alpha? Measuring the Value of Active Management with Utility Calculations”, Andrew Ang… Keep Reading

We occasionally ask publicly available artificial intelligence (AI) platforms for investing ideas and post results on the CXOAdvisory X account. Two recent examples are: “Please concisely provide your unique choice for the best risk-adjusted investment for generating monthly or quarterly income.” “Using data up to now, please concisely provide your unique estimate of which asset class… Keep Reading

Why do factor timing strategies that shine in research papers disappoint in real life? In his May 2025 paper entitled “Caveats of Simple Factor Timing Strategies”, David Blitz discusses the following  simple factor timing strategies with material and statistically significant outperformance per published studies: Short-term factor momentum – each month allocates 40%, 30%, 20%, 10%… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/2/25 through 6/6/25. 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.

Can large language models (LLM) be trusted for economic/financial forecasts during periods within their training data? In their April 2025 paper entitled “The Memorization Problem: Can We Trust LLMs’ Economic Forecasts?”, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Yuehua Tang and Mingyin Zhu evaluate use of  ChatGPT 4o (knowledge cutoff October 2023) for economic/financial forecasting via: Forecasts of variables before… Keep Reading