Investing Research Articles

Do volume spikes in specific equity options signal abnormal returns for underlying stocks? In his June 2016 paper entitled “Investor Attention Strategy”, Xuewu Wang examines the motivation, construction and profitability of a strategy that selects stocks based on sudden attention to associated options. He defines sudden attention as volume spikes of at least 10 contracts after a week… Keep Reading

Matt Hall, cofounder and president of Hill Investment Group, introduces his 2016 book, Odds On: The Making of an Evidence-Based Investor, by stating that: “…the evidence-based movement has been studying market data and academic research to identify the groups of stocks and other investments that provide better odds of long-term success. …I’m inviting you to learn how evidence-based… Keep Reading

Does availability of liquid tracking products change short-term trending/reversal tendencies of equity indexes? In their May 2016 paper entitled “Indexing and Stock Market Serial Dependence Around the World”, Guido Baltussen, Sjoerd van Bekkum and Zhi Da investigate how introduction of index futures, exchange-traded funds (ETF) and mutual funds affects measures of index serial dependence. They hypothesize that technical interplay in… Keep Reading

Do data-intensive, high-frequency investor sentiment measurements usefully predict stock index performance? In his May 2016 paper entitled “Can Sentiment Indicators Signal Market Reversals?”, Arnaud Lagarde applies a random forest machine learning algorithm to test the power of Amareos sentiment indications to predict stock index reversals. Algorithm training data relates sentiment to known stock index return for the next 182 days (six… Keep Reading

When does a cointegration test, which looks for a connection between two apparently wandering price paths, work for pairs trading? In their May 2016 paper entitled “Cointegration and Relative Value Arbitrage”, Binh Do and Robert Faff investigate the conditions under which cointegration successfully identifies stocks for pairs trading. Their basic pairs trading strategy is to each month: Identify cointegrated pairs… Keep Reading

Do asset returns exhibit cyclic relative strength? In the December 2015 revision of their paper entitled “Return Seasonalities”, Matti Keloharju, Juhani Linnainmaa and Peter Nyberg examine 12-month relative strength cycles via a strategy that is each month long (short) assets with the highest (lowest) returns during the same calendar month over the past 20 years. They apply this strategy to individual… Keep Reading

Are prominent stock market bloggers in aggregate able to predict the market’s direction? The Ticker Sense Blogger Sentiment Poll “is a survey of the web’s most prominent investment bloggers, asking ‘What is your outlook on the U.S. stock market for the next 30 days?’” (bullish, bearish or neutral) on a weekly basis. The site currently… Keep Reading

Does the January (turn-of-the-year) stock return anomaly affect value and momentum strategies applied at the country stock market level? In his June 2015 paper entitled “The January Seasonality and the Performance of Country-Level Value and Momentum Strategies”, Adam Zaremba investigates this question using four value and two momentum firm/stock metrics. The four value metrics, each measured over four prior… Keep Reading

A reader asked whether the gold-gold miner stocks arbitrage-like argument in Jay Kaeppel’s February 2010 article “Don’t Give Up On Gold Stocks Just Yet” (for which his September 2004 article “Gold Stock and Gold Bullion” is a more robust antecedent) supports frequent timing of these assets. For example, if SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) and Market Vectors Gold… Keep Reading

How good can factor investing get? In his May 2016 paper entitled “Quantitative Style Investing”, Mike Dickson examines strategies that: Aggregate return forecasting power of four or six theoretically-motivated stock factors (or characteristics) via monthly multivariate regressions. Use inception-to-date simple averages of regression coefficients, starting after the first 60 months and updating annually, to suppress estimation and sampling error. Create… Keep Reading