Investing Research Articles

…investors should recognize the difficulty of measuring the value of fundamental investment research in deciding whether or how much to spend for it.

…evidence from simple tests does not support a belief that Steve Sarnoff’s option trading recommendations have value. The “Options Hotline” promotional verbiage based on perfect hindsight seems intended more to deceive than to inform.

…a very small sample suggests that Washington Crossing Advisors forecasts the U.S. stock market a little more accurately than does the average U.S. equity expert, but they failed to predict the dramatic decline of 2008.

…the performance of Martin Weiss’ premium services in aggregate over the past year is unimpressive.

…Reading Minds and Markets offers an interesting perspective on what matters most in allocating funds to asset classes, but falls short of some other sources in terms of rigor and specificity.

…Full of Bull makes a good case for skepticism in the evaluation of investment research, advice and recommendations, but is incomplete and less convincing as an investing how-to.

…an up (down) January historically indicates February-December outperformance (underperformance) for the broad U.S. stock market, an anomaly best exploited by a strategy of being in stocks (Treasury bills) when January is up (down).

…Quantitative Strategies for Achieving Alpha offers an interesting quantified overview of the performance of various fundamental, sentiment and technical indicators with respect to U.S. stock sorts over the past generation. However, investors should probably assume that the results materially overstate the size of these indicator alphas.

…”despite the many ingenious tools they created to attack the puzzle, much remains unsolved. Discontinuities, irregularities, and volatilities seem to be proliferating rather than diminishing… The goal of wresting society from the laws of chance continues to elude us.”

As suggested by a reader, we evaluate here the market-related forecasts of Richard Band since late May 2002. Most of his predictions/recommendations come indirectly via MarketWatch columns, augmented by a few direct commentaries from The Money Show Digest. Mr. Band is editor of the Profitable Investing newsletter and author of the book Contrary Investing: The… Keep Reading