Investing Research Articles

Is the Buffett Indicator, the ratio of total U.S. stock market capitalization (proxied by Wilshire 5000 Total Market Full Cap, W5000) to U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a useful indicator of future U.S. stock market performance? W5000/GDP clearly has no stable average value over its available history (see the first chart below), so using the… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/21/20 through 12/24/20. 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.

Does the New Year’s Day holiday, a time of replanning and income tax positioning, systematically affect investors in a way that translates into U.S. stock market returns? To investigate, we analyze the historical behavior of the S&P 500 Index during the five trading days before and the five trading days after the holiday. Using daily… Keep Reading

“Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy” (SACEVS) finds that investors may be able to exploit relative valuation of the term risk premium, the credit (default) risk premium and the equity risk premium via exchange-traded funds (ETF). However, the backtesting period is limited by available histories for ETFs and for series used to estimate risk premiums. To construct… Keep Reading

Many institutional investors are attempting to exploit alternative data (less structured and more obscure than traditional data) to boost portfolio performance, supporting a complex system of data collectors, aggregators and organizers. How do they approach this potential edge? In their October 2020 paper entitled “Alternative Data in Investment Management: Usage, Challenges and Valuation”, Gene Ekster… Keep Reading

Is there a better way than the Fed model to measure relative attractiveness of equities and bonds. In his October 2020 paper entitled “Towards a Better Fed Model”, Raymond Micaletti examines seven Fed Model alternatives, each comparing a 10-year forward annualized estimate of equity returns to the yield of 10-year constant maturity U.S. Treasury notes… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/14/20 through 12/18/20. 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.

Do surprising fluctuations in short interest ratios of stocks indicate new information from short sellers that predicts returns of these stocks? In their November 2020 paper entitled “Surprise in Short Interest”, Matthias Hanauer, Pavel Lesnevski and Esad Smajlbegovic examine standardized unexpected short interest ratio as a stock return predictor. They define this variable as current… Keep Reading

Does the Christmas holiday, a time of putative good will toward all, give U.S. stock investors a sense of optimism that translates into stock returns? To investigate, we analyze the historical behavior of the S&P 500 Index during five trading days before through five trading days after the holiday. Using daily closing levels of the… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked about a strategy that switches between an equal-weighted portfolio of Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) and iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) when the S&P 500 Index is above its 200-day simple moving average (SMA200) and an equal-weighted portfolio of SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) and iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) when below…. Keep Reading