Investing Research Articles

Do changes in total market capitalization shares of large-capitalization and small-capitalization stocks predict future equity returns? In their September 2012 paper entitled “Davids, Goliaths, and Business Cycles”, Jefferson Duarte and Nishad Kapadia investigate whether a predictor based on concentration of market valuation predicts market returns. Specifically, they test the power of annual change in the logarithm of… Keep Reading

Does market-driven deviation of the price of an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from its net asset value (NAV) predict an exploitable future return? In the September 2012 draft of their paper entitled “Reading Tomorrow’s Newspaper: Predictability in ETF Returns”, Jon Fulkerson and Bradford Jordan examine the relationship between price-to-NAV ratio and next-day return for ETFs. Using daily opening and closing… Keep Reading

Is the outperformance of stocks during November-April compared to May-October pervasive worldwide and over time? In their October 2012 paper entitled “The Halloween Effect: Everywhere and All the Time”, Ben Jacobsen and Cherry Zhang test the “Halloween” or “Sell-in-May” effect for all stock markets worldwide using the full histories of indexes available for these markets (excluding dividends). Using 55,425… Keep Reading

How do specialized stock indexes relate to commonly used equity risk factors? In his February 2012 paper entitled “Evaluating Alternative Beta Strategies”, Xiaowei Kang examines risk exposures (betas), construction methodologies and historical performances of alternative stock indexes such as those based on value, low-volatility and diversification strategies. He considers five risk factors: (1) market, representing excess return… Keep Reading

What are the parameters of profitable stock pairs trading in European equity markets? In their June 2011 paper entitled “European Equity Pairs Trading: The Effect of Data Frequency on Risk and Return”, Michael Lucey and Don Walshe examine the effects of both price measurement frequency (daily, weekly or monthly) and magnitude of pair price divergence… Keep Reading

Are commodities effective diversifiers for stocks and bonds? In his September 2012 paper entitled “Commodity Investments: The Missing Piece of the Portfolio Puzzle?”, Xiaowei Kang examines the diversification properties of commodity indexes relative to stock and bond indexes. He focuses on the widely used S&P GSCI, composed of 24 commodities with liquid futures markets weighted by… Keep Reading

Are managed futures programs good portfolio diversifiers? In his September 2012 paper entitled “Revisiting Kat’s Managed Futures and Hedge Funds: A Match Made in Heaven”, Thomas Rollinger updates prior research exploring the diversification effects of adding managed futures to traditional portfolios of stocks and bonds and to portfolios including stocks, bonds and hedge funds. His proxies… Keep Reading

Does a low-beta strategy work for mutual funds? In his September 2012 paper entitled “Capitalizing on the Greatest Anomaly in Finance with Mutual Funds”, David Nanigian examines portfolios of funds sorted on lagged beta to determine whether mutual fund investors can capitalize on outperformance of low-beta assets. He calculates rolling betas for each mutual fund based… Keep Reading

Does the S&P 500 options-implied volatility index (VIX) exhibit predictable daily, overnight and intraday tendencies? In their September 2012 paper entitled “What Makes the VIX Tick?”, Warren Bailey, Lin Zheng and Yinggang Zhou employ high-frequency data to investigate patterns in VIX behavior and measure relationships between VIX and various financial fundamentals, economic announcements and investor… Keep Reading

In an August 2004 article entitled “Time is Right for These 7 Biotechs” (apparently no longer available on MSN Money), Jim Jubak states: “…in most years, biotechs decline in the spring as investors anticipate a summer hiatus in the conferences where new clinical results are announced. They rally in the fall as the conference schedule… Keep Reading