Investing Research Articles

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

The Inflation Forecast now incorporates actual total and core Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for May 2025. The actual total (core) inflation rate is lower than (lower than) forecasted.

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

Should investors expect a negative correlation between stock market and bond market returns? In his February 2025 paper entitled “Rethinking the Stock-Bond Correlation”, Thierry Roncalli examines the stocks-bond return correlation from theoretical and empirical perspectives, employing a 4-year rolling window of monthly returns for the latter. Using both long-term and recent returns, he finds that:

Should stock return model complexity guide breadth of input data? In their May 2025 paper entitled “Model Complexity and the Performance of Global Versus Regional Models”, Minghui Chen, Matthias Hanauer and Tobias Kalsbach assess the predictive performance of global versus regional inputs for stock return models based on linear and machine learnings algorithms: ordinary least… Keep Reading