Investing Research Articles

…evidence from simple tests on a limited data set suggests that investors using monthly simple moving averages to time the stock market should prefer (avoid) a calculation cycle anchored just after (a few days before) month ends.

Can investors beat a typical active U.S. equity mutual fund via a small portfolio of periodically re-weighted equity exchange-traded funds (ETF)? In their February 2019 paper entitled “Are Passive Funds Really Superior Investments: An Investor Perspective”, flagged by a subscriber, Edwin Elton, Martin Gruber and Andre de Souza: Determine via cluster analysis a small set… Keep Reading

How reliable and variable are the most widely accepted long-short factor premiums across asset classes? Can investors time factor premium? In their June 2019 paper entitled “Factor Premia and Factor Timing: A Century of Evidence”, Antti Ilmanen, Ronen Israel, Tobias Moskowitz, Ashwin Thapar and Franklin Wang examine multi-class robustness of and variation in four prominent… Keep Reading

Is there a common optimal set of ranking (lookback) interval, holding interval, weighting scheme and skip-month rule for long-short stock momentum strategies across European country markets? In her May 2019 paper entitled “Are Momentum Strategies Profitable? Recent Evidence from European Markets”, Anastasia Slabchenko identifies optimal parameter sets from 576 long-short stock momentum strategy variations in… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 7/1/19 through 7/5/19. 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.

Do sentiment indexes usefully predict U.S. stock market returns? In his May 2018 doctoral thesis entitled “Forecasting Market Direction with Sentiment Indices”, flagged by a subscriber, David Mascio tests whether the following five sentiment indexes predict next-month S&P 500 Index performance: Investor Sentiment – the Baker-Wurgler Index, which combines six sentiment proxies. Improved Investor Sentiment… Keep Reading

Does duration (relative arrival sequence) of firm cash flows explain many widely accepted equity factor returns? In their April 2019 paper entitled “Duration-Driven Returns”, Niels Gormsen and Eben Lazarus investigate whether firm cash flow duration explains value, profitability, investment, low risk, idiosyncratic volatility and payout factor returns. They measure cash flow duration monthly via multiple… Keep Reading

…evidence from simple tests indicates that quarterly change in productivity is of no use to investors as a standalone indicator for predicting stock market behavior.

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/24/19 through 6/28/19. 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 stock performance vary with age (since listing), and does any such effect interact with market capitalization (size)? In their April 2019 paper entitled “Age Matters”, Danqiao Guo, Phelim Boyle, Chengguo Weng and Tony Wirjanto examine age and size of U.S. stocks in combination. To disentangle interaction, they generate 20,000 simulations for each of two… Keep Reading