Investing Research Articles

Does  applying a simple moving average (SMA) filter improve performance of the “Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy” (SACEVS), which seeks diversification across the following three asset class exchange-traded funds (ETF) plus cash according to the relative valuations of term, credit and equity risk premiums? 3-month Treasury bills (Cash) iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT) iShares iBoxx $… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/9/19 through 12/13/19. 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 differences in expectations between institutional and individual investors in stocks and bonds, as quantified in weekly legacy Commitments of Traders (COT) reports, offer exploitable timing signals? In the February 2019 revision of his paper entitled “Want Smart Beta? Follow the Smart Money: Market and Factor Timing Using Relative Sentiment”, flagged by a subscriber, Raymond… Keep Reading

Inflation at the producer level (per the Producer Price Index, PPI) is arguably an advance indicator for inflation downstream at the consumer level (per the Consumer Price Index, CPI). Do investors reliably react to changes in PPI as an indicator of the future wealth discount rate? In other words, is a high (low) producer-level inflation… Keep Reading

What does it mean when the number of stock funds exceeds the number of stocks they hold? In their October 2019 paper entitled “What Happens with More Funds than Stocks?”, Ananth Madhavan, Aleksander Sobczyk and Andrew Ang tackle this question by examining holdings over time for all U.S. active equity mutual funds and equity exchange-traded… Keep Reading

Are the “Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy” (SACEVS) and the “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” (SACEMS) mutually diversifying. To check, we look at three equal-weighted (50-50) combinations of the two strategies, rebalanced monthly: SACEVS Best Value paired with SACEMS Top 1 (aggressive value and aggressive momentum). SACEVS Best Value paired with SACEMS Equally Weighted (EW) Top 3… Keep Reading

A subscriber proposed an alternative to the strategy tested in “Using P/E10 Thresholds to Time the U.S. Stock Market”, which rebalances a stocks-bonds portfolio based on Shiller cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio (P/E10 or CAPE) thresholds, as follows: If P/E10 > 22, hold 40% stocks and 60% bonds. If 14 < P/E10 < 22, hold 60%… Keep Reading

Are Bollinger Bands (BB) useful for deciding when to buy low and when to sell high the overall U.S. stock market? In other words, can an investor beat a buy-and-hold strategy by systematically buying (selling) when the market crosses below (above) the lower (upper) BB? To check, we examine the historical behavior of BBs around… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/2/19 through 12/6/19. 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.

Which equity factors from among those included in the most widely accepted factor models are really important? In their October 2019 paper entitled “Winners from Winners: A Tale of Risk Factors”, Siddhartha Chib, Lingxiao Zhao, Dashan Huang and Guofu Zhou examine what set of equity factors from among the 12 used in four models with… Keep Reading