Investing Research Articles

…spectral analysis confirms the probable existence of U.S. stock market cycles that coincide with election cycles.

…investors/traders may be able to enhance market timing results by focusing on the most predictable styles/industries (for example, via exchange-traded funds).

…hedge fund investors should recognize that many funds generate “alpha” by taking liquidity risks that make converting assets to cash difficult.

…relative demand for a stock peaks at $xx.99, while relative supply peaks at $xx.01, suggesting resistance to crossing dollar thresholds.

…the value premium among stocks is persistent across value indicators, time, market capitalizations and geographical markets.

…among a broad sample of actively managed mutual funds, stock picking makes a greater contribution to returns than sector allocation. The average contributions to fund returns from market-sectors-stocks are 79%-9%-12%.

Both EMH and BSH challenge at fundamental levels the continuity of relationships between/among financial variables…

…ETFs offer easy and unique (even leveraged) access to a wide range of asset class/market/style/sector indexes. The 17% of ETFs that compete directly with index mutual funds perform similarly to, or perhaps slightly better than, those mutual funds.

…raw stock returns for firms in new U.S. industries tend on average to be positive and substantial, but very concentrated among a few companies. Risk-adjusted returns for new industries mostly match or underperform the broad U.S. stock market over their first 15-20 years.

…investors should probably use the excess market return (beta), size and liquidity factors in explaining and predicting individual stock returns, but not the book-to-market ratio (value factor) or other commonly used stock/firm-specific factors.