August 21, 2014 - Value Premium
What is the best way to capture the slowly realized and variable value premium? In his August 2014 paper entitled “Value Investing: Smart Beta vs. Style Indices”, Jason Hsu compares exploitation of the value premium by traditional style indexes and recent smart beta strategies. Traditional value indexes pick stocks with low price‐to‐book ratios (P/B) and weight them by market capitalization…. Keep Reading
August 19, 2014 - Big Ideas
How can researchers account for the snooping bias derived from testing of multiple strategy alternatives on the same set of data? In the July 2014 version of their paper entitled “Evaluating Trading Strategies”, Campbell Harvey and Yan Liu describe tools that adjust strategy evaluation for multiple testing. They note that conventional thresholds for statistical significance assume an independent… Keep Reading
August 18, 2014 - Investing Expertise, Mutual/Hedge Funds
How should investors use Morningstar mutual fund ratings/grades to select mutual funds? In his July 2014 paper entitled “Morningstar Mutual Fund Measures and Selection Model”, John Haslem surveys the five kinds of Morningstar mutual fund ratings and grades: (1) Morningstar star ratings (one to five stars); (2) analyst ratings (gold, silver, bronze, neutral and negative); (3) total pillar… Keep Reading
August 15, 2014 - Calendar Effects, Momentum Investing
In response to “Optimal Monthly Cycle for Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy?”, a subscriber asked about the optimal monthly cycle for “Simple Sector ETF Momentum Strategy”, which each month allocates all funds to the one of the following nine Select Sector Standard & Poor’s Depository Receipts (SPDR) exchange-traded funds (ETF) with the highest total return… Keep Reading
August 13, 2014 - Big Ideas, Mutual/Hedge Funds, Volatility Effects
Are widely used volatility-adjusted investment performance metrics, such as Sharpe ratio, robust to different measurement intervals? In the July 2014 version of their paper entitled “The Divergence of High- and Low-Frequency Estimation: Implications for Performance Measurement”, William Kinlaw, Mark Kritzman and David Turkington examine the sensitivity of such metrics to the length of the return interval… Keep Reading
August 12, 2014 - Commodity Futures, Momentum Investing
Has the growing role of financial investors in commodities markets (financialization) weakened performance of widely used momentum and term structure investing strategies? In his July 2014 paper entitled “Strategies Based on Momentum and Term Structure in Financialized Commodity Markets”, Adam Zaremba investigates impacts of financialization of commodity markets on the profitability of momentum and term structure strategies. His base momentum strategy is… Keep Reading
August 8, 2014 - Fundamental Valuation
What is the state of cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratios (CAPE, P/E10 or Shiller PE), stock index level divided by average real earnings over the past ten years, across country equity markets worldwide? In their July 2014 paper entitled “CAPE around the World: Update 2014 – The Relationship between Risk and Return”, Joachim Klement and Oliver Dettmann update expected returns for… Keep Reading
August 7, 2014 - Size Effect, Value Premium
Is risk for long-term investors different from that for short-term investors? In his July 2014 paper entitled “Rethinking Risk (II): The Size and Value Effects”, Javier Estrada examines the riskiness of small stocks versus large stocks and value (high book-to-market ratio) stocks versus growth stocks based on conventional and unconventional metrics. Each year during 1927 through 2013,… Keep Reading
August 4, 2014 - Mutual/Hedge Funds
Is there a best way to exploit unusual closed-end fund discounts to net asset value? In their July 2014 paper entitled “Exploiting Closed-End Fund Discounts: The Market May Be Much More Inefficient Than You Thought”, Dilip Patro, Louis Piccotti and Yangru Wu construct two regression models to predict closed-end fund returns: One model is a simple regression based on the… Keep Reading
August 1, 2014 - Animal Spirits, Individual Investing
How strong is investor herding with respect to friends, family and co-workers? In their June 2014 paper entitled “Peer Effects, Personal Characteristics and Asset Allocation”, Annie Zhang, Ben Jacobsen and Ben Marshall examine the roles of personal characteristics (age, gender, wealth and tax rate), peer influence (household, neighbors and coworkers), and financial advice in individual investor asset class allocations and switching decisions. Their… Keep Reading