Investing Research Articles

How big is the return premium associated with stock illiquidity? In his March 2014 paper entitled “The Pricing of the Illiquidity Factor’s Systematic Risk”, Yakov Amihud specifies and measures an illiquidity premium. He defines illiquidity as the average daily ratio of absolute return to dollar volume over the past three months. He specifies the illiquidity… Keep Reading

What is the best way to generate price trend signals for trading futures/forward contracts? In their December 2013 paper entitled “CTAs – Which Trend is Your Friend?”, Fabian Dori, Manuel Krieger, Urs Schubiger and Daniel Torgler compare risk-adjusted performances of three ways of translating trends into trading signals: Binary signals (up or down) trigger 100%… Keep Reading

How well do long-short stock strategies work, after accounting for all costs? In their February 2014 paper entitled “Assessing the Cost of Accounting-Based Long-Short Trades: Should You Invest a Billion Dollars in an Academic Strategy?”, William Beaver, Maureen McNichols and Richard Price examine the net attractiveness of several long-short strategies as stand-alone investments (as for… Keep Reading

Does the expanding set of exchange-traded funds (ETF) support reliable replication (cloning) of future hedge fund returns? In their March 2014 paper entitled “In Search of Missing Risk Factors: Hedge Fund Return Replication with ETFs”, Jun Duanmu, Yongjia Li and Alexey Malakhov investigate the use of ETFs as factors in constructing hedge fund clones. They… Keep Reading

Can the best traders reliably exploit the ex-dividend effect (the tendency for dividend-paying stocks to fall by less than the dividend amount after paying the dividend)? In their March 2014 paper entitled “Ex-Dividend Profitability and Institutional Trading Skill”, Tyler Henry and Jennifer Koski examine whether highly skilled traders bearing very low transaction costs (some institutions)… Keep Reading

How should investors interpret findings of statistical significance in academic studies of financial markets? In the March 2014 draft of their paper entitled “Significance Testing in Empirical Finance: A Critical Review and Assessment”, Jae Kim and Philip Ji review significance testing in recent research on financial markets. They focus on interplay of two types of… Keep Reading

Do some stocks react more strongly to economic uncertainty than others? In the March 2014 draft of their paper entitled “Cross-Sectional Dispersion in Economic Forecasts and Expected Stock Returns”, Turan Bali, Stephen Brown and Yi Tang examine the role of economic uncertainty in the pricing of individual stocks. They measure economic uncertainty as disagreement (dispersion)… Keep Reading

Is expected crude oil price volatility (risk) an important economic indicator, thereby influencing stock market and individual stock returns? In their February 2014 paper entitled “Oil Risk Exposure and Expected Stock Returns”, Peter Christoffersen and Nick Pan analyze the impact of expected oil risk on the U.S. stock market and on the cross section of… Keep Reading

Are Google Trends data an independently useful tool in predicting stock returns? In their March 2014 paper entitled “Do Google Trend Data Contain More Predictability than Price Returns?”, Damien Challet and Ahmed Bel Hadj Ayed apply non-linear machine learning methods to measure whether Google Trends data outperform past returns in predicting future stock returns. They focus on avoiding… Keep Reading

Does aggregate short interest serve as an intermediate-term stock market indicator based on either momentum (shorting begets shorting) or reversion (covering follows shorting)? To investigate, we relate the behavior of NYSE aggregate short interest with that of SPDR S&P 500 (SPY). Prior to September 2007, NYSE aggregate short interest is monthly (as of the middle… Keep Reading