Investing Research Articles

Are aggregate periodic stocks-bonds rebalancing actions of Target Date Funds (TDF), which trade against momentum, increasingly affecting U.S. stock market dynamics? In their October 2020 paper entitled “Retail Financial Innovation and Stock Market Dynamics: The Case of Target Date Funds”, flagged by a subscriber, Jonathan Parker, Antoinette Schoar and Yang Sun examine market impacts of… Keep Reading

Is there a reliable and material market capitalization (size) effect among U.S. stocks around the turn-of-the-year (TOTY)? To check, we track cumulative returns from 20 trading days before through 20 trading days after the end of the calendar year for the Russell 2000 Index, the S&P 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA)… Keep Reading

Does the U.S. stock market respond predictably to simultaneous earnings announcements of attention-grabbing companies? In their September 2020 paper entitled “Famous Firms, Earnings Clusters, and the Stock Market”, Yixin Chen, Randolph Cohen and Zixuan Wang examine U.S. stock market (E-mini S&P 500 futures) responses to earnings announcement clusters (EAC) comprised of high-attention firms. They focus… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 11/9/20 through 11/13/20. 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 aggregate U.S. stock market value sensitive to flows of new funds (inelastic)? In their October 2020 paper entitled “In Search of the Origins of Financial Fluctuations: The Inelastic Markets Hypothesis”, Xavier Gabaix and Ralph Koijen analyze aggregate stock market fluctuations  in relation to flows of money into and out of stocks by different investor categories…. Keep Reading

The Inflation Forecast now incorporates actual total and core Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for October 2020. The actual total (core) inflation rate is a little lower than (a little lower than) forecasted.

Does technology amplify adverse herding among inexperienced investors? In their October 2020 paper entitled “Attention Induced Trading and Returns: Evidence from Robinhood Users”, Brad Barber, Xing Huang, Terrance Odean and Christopher Schwarz test the relationship between episodes of intense stock buying by retail (Robinhood) investors and future returns. Their source for buying intensity is the… Keep Reading

Has growth in the importance of intangible (knowledge) assets versus real assets undermined usefulness of the conventional equity value premium (based only on the latter)? In her September 2020 paper entitled “Intangibles: The Missing Ingredient in Book Value”, Feifei Li explores whether including intangible assets when calculating book value better measures firm fundamental value. She… Keep Reading

A subscriber requested, as in “Combine Market Trend and Economic Trend Signals?”, testing of a strategy that combines: (1) U.S. Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) Index, as described and tested separately in “Economic Policy Uncertainty and the Stock Market”; and, (2) U.S. stock market trend. We consider two such combinations. The first combines: 10-month simple moving… Keep Reading

Does quantified uncertainty in government economic policy reliably predict stock market returns? To investigate, we consider the U.S. Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) Index, created by Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis and constructed from three components: Coverage of policy-related economic uncertainty by prominent newspapers. Number of temporary federal tax code provisions set to expire in… Keep Reading