Investing Research Articles

A reader wondered: “Is astrology more or less accurate than Jim Cramer?” She suggested that we check by reviewing the monthly stock market predictions of SootheSayer Linda Schurman, available back to August 2004. As an astrologer, Linda Schurman states that her “profession is all about cycles…” The table below quotes forecast highlights from the cited source… Keep Reading

…investors who pick stocks may want to focus on two firm characteristics: (1) investment-to-assets ratio; and, (2) return on assets. Evidence indicates that these two characteristics are foundational to a broad range of stock return anomalies.

…investors may want to investigate the commentaries of unfamiliar experts who accrue significant user-initiated interest as evidenced by search frequency.

…limited evidence indicates that any abnormal performance of the the Value Line Timeliness Ranking System may have disappeared.

Tim Wood, who maintains the “Cycles News & Views” web site, requested that we remove the review of his public stock market forecasts. His rationale is as follows:

…evidence suggests that investors may be able to enhance stock buyback signaling by focusing on firms with relatively low insider ownership.

A reader suggested that we evaluate the forecasting prowess of Bill Gross, manager for PIMCO of the world’s largest bond fund. PIMCO describes itself as “one of the largest specialty fixed income managers in the world…” The predictions/recommendations evaluated here extend as far back as February 2000 and come from columns in MarketWatch, CNN/Money and… Keep Reading

…stock betas calculated from historical data vary considerably over short intervals, across calculation methods and across data sources and therefore may be of little or no value as an investment tool.

…evidence indicates that short sellers are on average able to identify both overvalued and undervalued stocks. Investors/traders may be able to exploit the economically large positive future returns of lightly shorted stocks with simple long-only strategies.

…evidence indicates that many sentiment indicators add little or no value to simple price action indicators, but VIX purified of price action contains significant predictive power for future stock market returns. However, price action masks the predictive information contained in raw VIX.