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Investing Research Articles

3490 Research Articles

Turn-of-the-Month Effect Persistence and Robustness

Is the Turn-of-the-Month (TOTM) effect, a concentration of relatively strong stock market returns around the turns of calendar months, persistent over time and robust to different market conditions. Does it exist for all calendar months? Does it persist throughout the U.S. political cycle? Does it work for different equity indexes? To investigate, we define TOTM… Keep Reading

Weekly Summary of Research Findings: 1/16/24 – 1/19/24

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/16/24 through 1/19/24. 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.

Federal Surplus/Deficit and Stock Returns

Does the level of, or change in, the annual U.S. federal surplus/deficit systematically influence the U.S. stock market, perhaps by affecting consumption and thereby corporate earnings or by modifying inflation and thereby discount rates? To check, we relate annual stock market returns to the annual surplus/deficit (receipts minus outlays) as a percentage of Gross Domestic… Keep Reading

January Barometer Over the Long Run

Does long term data support the belief that “as goes January, so goes the rest of the year” (January is the barometer) for the the U.S. stock market? To investigate, we consider two views of the S&P 500 Index over its full history: Correlations between index returns during each calendar month and returns over the… Keep Reading

Optimal Intrinsic Momentum and SMA Intervals Across Asset Classes

What are optimal intrinsic/absolute/time series momentum (IM) and simple moving average (SMA) lookback intervals for different asset class proxies? To investigate, we use data for the following eight asset class exchange-traded funds (ETF), plus Cash: Invesco DB Commodity Index Tracking (DBC) iShares JPMorgan Emerging Markets Bond Fund (EMB) iShares MSCI EAFE Index (EFA) SPDR Gold… Keep Reading

Testing the All Weather Portfolio

A subscriber requested a test of Ray Dalio‘s All Weather (AW) portfolio with different rebalancing frequencies, allocated to exchange-traded funds (ETF) as asset class proxies as follows: 30% – Vanguard Total Stock Market (VTI) 40% – iShares 20+ Year Treasury (TLT) 15% – iShares 7-10 Year Treasury (IEF) 7.5% – SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) 7.5% –… Keep Reading

Weekly Summary of Research Findings: 1/8/24 – 1/12/24

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/8/24 through 1/12/24. 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.

Year of the Decade Effect?

Are some years of the decade better than others for equity markets? To investigate, we look at average annual returns by year of the decade (xxx0 through xxx9) for the U.S. stock market. Using annual levels of Shiller’s S&P Composite Index for 1871-2023 and the S&P 500 Index for 1928-2023, we find that:

Ziemba Party Holding Presidency Strategy Update

“Exploiting the Presidential Cycle and Party in Power” summarizes strategies that hold small stocks (large stock or bonds) when Democrats (Republicans) hold the U.S. presidency. How has this strategy performed in recent years? To investigate, we consider three strategy alternatives using exchange-traded funds (ETF): D-IWM:R-SPY: hold iShares Russell 2000 (IWM) when Democrats hold the presidency and SPDR… Keep Reading

Performance of Barron’s Annual Top 10 Stocks

Each year in December, Barron’s publishes its list of the best 10 stocks for the next year. Do these picks on average beat the market? To investigate, we scrape the web to find these lists for years 2011 through 2023, calculate the associated calendar year total return for each stock and calculate the average return… Keep Reading