Investing Research Articles

“Daily Global Investor Sentiment” discusses the risk-on/risk-off (RORO) index as a measure of global investor risk appetite, with the underlying dataset publicly available. Can investors exploit this dataset for short-term timing of investments in stocks (risk-on) and government bonds (risk-off)? To investigate, we relate future daily returns for SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) and… Keep Reading

Can a multifaceted measure of investor sentiment convincingly predict returns? In their November 2024 paper entitled “Risk-on/Risk-off: Measuring Shifts in Investor Sentiment”, flagged by a subscriber, Anusha Chari, Karlye Stedman and Christian Lundblad explore risk-on/risk-off (RORO) as the variation in global investor risk taking behavior. Their RORO index captures time-varying investor risk appetite as the… Keep Reading

Is proximity to doom good or bad for the U.S. stock market? To measure proximity to doom, we use the Doomsday Clock “Minutes-to-Midnight” metric, revised intermittently in late January via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which “warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own… Keep Reading

Why do many retail investors stick with high-cost, full-service brokers? In their January 2025 paper entitled “Fee Awareness and Brokerage Choice”, Gregory Eaton, Steven Malliaris and Miguel Puertas survey a sample of retail customers of full-service brokers to answer this question. They assemble 399 survey participants via CloudResearch, requiring that each: lives in the U.S.;… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 2/3/25 through 2/7/25. 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.

Is stock price all-time high a consistently effective trigger for trend following? In their January 2025 paper entitled “Does Trend-Following Still Work on Stocks?”, Carlo Zarattini, Alberto Pagani and Cole Wilcox revisit and extend the results of prior 2005 research on long-only trend following based on stock price all-time high that used 1980-2004 data. They… Keep Reading

How can investors estimate the value of musical assets as an alternative investment? In their January 2025 paper entitled “Pricing Music Royalty Assets”, Luis Villalobos, Yuao Peng, Ananya Mohapatra, Caroline He, Tiffany Filawo, Sasha Stoikov and Umu Cetin develop a royalty decay model to predict revenue streams for music assets. They then apply a discounted… Keep Reading

Can fund managers, and thereby individual investors, reliably exploit academic research on equity factors? In his January 2025 paper entitled “Do Factor Strategies Beat the Market?”, Edward McQuarrie reviews differences between the results of academic factor studies and fund manager/investor experience, with focus on the size effect (small stocks outperform) and the value premium (value… Keep Reading

Recent research in accounting and finance finds that large language models (LLM) beat humans on a variety of related tasks, but the black box nature of LLMs obscures why. Is LLM outperformance real? In his December 2024 paper entitled “Caution Ahead: Numerical Reasoning and Look-ahead Bias in AI Models”, Bradford Levy conducts a series of… Keep Reading

Do annual stock picks from the Meta AI large language model beat the market? To investigate, we ask Meta AI to pick the top 10 stocks for each of 2020-2024 based on information available only before each year. For example, we ask Meta AI to pick stocks for 2020 as follows: “Limiting yourself strictly to… Keep Reading