Investing Research Articles

How do crypto-asset prices interact with conventional market risks, monetary policy and crypto-specific factors? In their July 2024 paper entitled “What Drives Crypto Asset Prices?”, Austin Adams, Markus Ibert and Gordon Liao investigate factors influencing crypto-asset returns using a sign-restricted, structural vector auto-regressive model. Specifically, they decompose daily Bitcoin returns into components reflecting: Monetary policy… Keep Reading

“CNN Fear and Greed Index as Return Predictor” reports findings from a draft study that the CNN Fear and Greed Index (F&G) may be useful for U.S. stock index timing. The authors of that paper generously provided their hand-collected sample of daily CNN F&G levels for 4/7/21 through 3/8/24. We partly validate and extend that… Keep Reading

How should global investors assess country sovereign bond and equity risks? In his July 2024 paper entitled “Country Risk: Determinants, Measures and Implications – The 2024 Edition”, Aswath Damodaran examines country risk from multiple perspectives. To estimate a country risk premium, he considers measurements of both country government bond risk and country equity risk. Based… Keep Reading

Does the Labor Day holiday, marking the end of summer distractions, signal unusual return effects by refocusing U.S. stock investors on managing their portfolios? By its definition, this holiday brings with it any effects from the turn of the month. To investigate the possibility of short-term effects on stock market returns around Labor Day, we… Keep Reading

Morningstar finds in “Mind the Gap” that poor timing of trades by mutual fund investors results in 1.7% annual underperformance of buy-and-hold (6.0% versus 7.7%) during 2013 through 2022. Is this finding correct? In the July 2024 draft of their paper entitled “Bad Timing Does Not Cost Investors One Fifth of Their Funds’ Returns: An… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 8/19/24 through 8/23/24. 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 the CNN Fear and Greed Index useful for predicting asset returns? In the July 2024 draft of their paper entitled “The CNN Fear and Greed Index as a Predictor of Us Equity Index Returns”, flagged by a subscriber, Hugh Farrell and Fergal O’Connor use regressions of hand-collected data to investigate whether the index reliably… Keep Reading

Is stock price-to-earnings ratio (P/E), in aggregate or by individual stock, truly predictive of returns? In their April 2024 paper entitled “Valuing Stocks With Earnings”, Sebastian Hillenbrand and Odhrain McCarthy examine relationships between P/E and future returns at both stock index and individual stock levels. They compare generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) earnings and an… Keep Reading

“SACEVS and SACEMS Strategy Momentum?” finds support for belief that a strategy exploiting the relative performance of Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy (SACEVS) Best Value and Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) Equal-Weighted (EW) Top 2 boosts performance, with focus on a 60%-40% tilt toward the strategy with the stronger past returns. It… Keep Reading

Is systematically selling covered equity put options, as implemented by exchange-traded funds (ETF), attractive? To investigate, we consider four equity put-write ETFs, two dead and two living: US Equity High Volatility Put Write (HVPW) – oriented toward individual stocks (dead). ALPS Enhanced Put Write Strategy (PUTX) – index-oriented (dead). WisdomTree PutWrite Strategy Fund (PUTW) – index-oriented (living)…. Keep Reading