Investing Research Articles

Could mutual fund managers achieve performance improvements by “hiring” artificial intelligence (AI) analysts? In their May 2025 working draft entitled “The Shadow Price of ‘Public’ Information”,  Ed deHaan, Chanseok Lee, Miao Liu and Suzie Noh estimate the value of an AI stock picking analyst by having it exploit public data to improve mutual fund holdings. Specifically,… Keep Reading

How fast should individuals plan to grow net worth as they age? To investigate, we examine median levels of household (1) total net worth and (2) net worth excluding home equity from several vintages of U.S. Census Bureau data. We make the following head-of-household age cohort assumptions: “Less than 35 years” means about age 30. “35 to… Keep Reading

How can investors avoid out-of-sample factor investing strategy failures driven by use of non-causal research methods? In their May 2025 paper entitled “A Protocol for Causal Factor Investing”, Marcos Lopez de Prado and Vincent Zoonekynd introduce the concept of the factor mirage, a factor model that appears statistically valid but is causally mis-specified. They then… Keep Reading

The middle of the year might be a time for funds to dress their windows and investors to review and revise portfolios. The 4th of July celebration might engender optimism among U.S. investors. Are there any reliable patterns in daily U.S. stock market returns around mid-year and the 4th of July? To check, we analyze… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/16/25 through 6/20/25. 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.

“Invest with the Fed?” finds that indexes based on the Invest With the Fed (IFED) stock selection strategy beat reasonable benchmarks. How does that finding translate to investable assets? To investigate, we look at performances since inception of two exchange-traded note (ETN) offerings: ETRACS IFED Invest with the Fed TR Index ETN (IFED), with SPDR… Keep Reading

Are low volatility stock strategies, as implemented by exchange-traded funds (ETF), attractive? To investigate, we consider eight of the largest low volatility ETFs, all currently available, in order of longest to shortest available histories: Invesco S&P 500 Low Volatility Portfolio (SPLV) – the 100 stocks from the S&P 500 Index with the lowest realized volatility over the… Keep Reading

How does the performance of the U.S. stock market compare to that of the aggregated stock markets in the rest of the world over the long run? Is there alternating leadership? To investigate, we use the S&P 500 Index (SP500) as a proxy for the U.S. stock market and the World ex USA Index in… Keep Reading

Do funds based on holdings/trades of members of the U.S. Congress and their families beat the market? To investigate, we look at performances of two recently introduced exchange-traded funds (ETF): Unusual Whales Subversive Democratic Trading ETF (NANC) – invests primarily in stocks held by Democratic members of Congress and/or their families per public disclosure filings…. Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/9/25 through 6/13/25. 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.