Investing Research Articles

Can investors detect when commodity futures momentum, value and carry (basis) strategies are crowded and therefore likely to generate relatively weak returns? In the March 2021 version of their paper entitled “Crowding and Factor Returns”, Wenjin Kang, Geert Rouwenhorst and Ke Tang examine how crowding by commodity futures traders affects expected returns for momentum, value… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/24/21 through 5/28/21. 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.

A subscriber inquired whether a longer test of the “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” (SACEMS) is feasible using mutual funds rather than exchange-traded funds (ETF) as asset class proxies. To investigate, we consider the following set of mutual funds (partly adapted from the paper summarized in “Asset Allocation Combining Momentum, Volatility, Correlation and Crash Protection”): Vanguard Total Stock… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/17/21 through 5/21/21. 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.

Does the recency effect evident for U.S. stock returns carry over to stocks globally? In their May 2021 paper entitled “Chronological Return Ordering and the Cross-Section of International Stock Returns”, Nusret Cakici and Adam Zaremba examine whether the recency effects holds among stocks worldwide. Their measure of recency (Chronological Return Ordering, CRO) for each stock… Keep Reading

Do naive investors overvalue (undervalue) stocks with relatively high (low) recent returns, thereby causing exploitable overpricing (underpricing)? In the April 2019 version of his paper entitled “The Impact of Recency Effects on Stock Market Prices”, Hannes Mohrschladt devises and tests a measure of this recency effect based on correlation between daily returns during a month… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/10/21 through 5/14/21. 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.

Does the conventional wisdom to “Sell in May” (and “Buy in November”, hence also the term “Halloween Effect”) work over the long run, perhaps due to biological/psychological effects of seasons (Seasonal Affective Disorder)? To check, we turn to the long run dataset of Robert Shiller. This data set includes monthly levels of the S&P Composite… Keep Reading

Is buy-the-dip (BTD) a reliably attractive stock market timing approach? In their April 2021 paper entitled “Buy the Dip”, Thomas Shohfi and Majeed Simaan devise and test various BTD strategies as applied to SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), as follows: BTD with Lump Sum – 54 variations in which the investor progressively allocates a… Keep Reading

How can retirees estimate whether their investment strategy will sustain all the withdrawals they expect to make in retirement? In his February 2021 paper entitled “The Sustainability of (Global) Withdrawal Strategies”, Javier Estrada  presents two tools to monitor retirement plans for early signs of trouble: One evaluates sustainability of an existing withdrawal strategy. The other… Keep Reading