Should retirement portfolios include an allocation to managed futures? In his October 2017 paper entitled “Using Trend-Following Managed Futures to Increase Expected Withdrawal Rates”, Andrew Miller compares seven 30-year retirement scenarios via backtests and modified backtests. Specifically,...
Does relative demand for call and put options on individual stocks, as measured by average difference in implied volatilities of at-the-money calls and puts (aggregate implied volatility spread), predict stock market returns? In their September...
Is it better to build equity multifactor portfolios by holding distinct single-factor sub-portfolios, or by picking only stocks that satisfy multiple factor criteria? In their September 2017 paper entitled “Smart Beta Multi-Factor Construction Methodology: Mixing...
How efficiently do mutual funds capture factor premiums? In their April 2017 paper entitled “The Incredible Shrinking Factor Return”, Robert Arnott, Vitali Kalesnik and Lillian Wu investigate whether factor tilts employed by mutual fund managers deliver the alpha found...
Which equity factors have high and low expected returns? In their February 2017 paper entitled “Forecasting Factor and Smart Beta Returns (Hint: History Is Worse than Useless)”, Robert Arnott, Noah Beck and Vitali Kalesnik evaluate attractiveness...
How should factor-based (style) investors proceed after picking a factor to exploit? In their September 2017 paper entitled “Craftsmanship Alpha: An Application to Style Investing”, Ronen Israel, Sarah Jiang and Adrienne Ross survey style portfolio implementation options. They start...
Is stock factor timing attractive? In their September 2016 paper entitled “Timing ‘Smart Beta’ Strategies? Of Course! Buy Low, Sell High!”, Robert Arnott, Noah Beck and Vitali Kalesnik investigate whether timing of stock factor (long-short) and smart beta (long-only)...
Does transient factor popularity drive factor/smart beta portfolio performance by pushing valuations of associated stocks up and down? In their February 2016 paper entitled “How Can ‘Smart Beta’ Go Horribly Wrong?”, Robert Arnott, Noah Beck, Vitali...
Do broad (capitalization-weighted) stock market indexes exhibit factor tilts that may indicate concentrations in corresponding risks? In their August 2017 paper entitled “What’s in Your Benchmark? A Factor Analysis of Major Market Indexes”, Ananth Madhavan, Aleksander Sobczyk...
Does global diversification improve smart beta (equity factor) investing strategies? In their September 2017 paper entitled “Diversification Strikes Again: Evidence from Global Equity Factors”, Jay Binstock, Engin Kose and Michele Mazzoleni examine effects of global diversification on...
Can investors confidently pick hedge funds that will do well? In their September 2017 paper entitled “Hedge Fund Performance Prediction”, Nicolas Bollen, Juha Joenväärä and Mikko Kauppila examine the forecasting power of 26 hedge fund performance predictors identified...
Why don’t machines rule the financial world? In his September 2017 presentation entitled “The 7 Reasons Most Machine Learning Funds Fail”, Marcos Lopez de Prado explores causes of the high failure rate of quantitative finance firms,...
Does uncertainty about future firm earnings underlie stock factor returns? In their August 2017 paper entitled “Uncertainty, Momentum, and Profitability”, Claire Liang, Zhenyang Tang and Xiaowei Xu examine relationships between analyst uncertainty about current-year firm earnings and four U.S....
A subscriber, noting an article on slowing down intrinsic (absolute or time series) momentum for SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) when its return volatility is relatively high, suggested doing the same for the Simple Asset Class...
Does margin debt serve as an intermediate-term stock market sentiment indicator based on either momentum (with an increase/decrease in margin debt signaling a continuing stock market advance/decline) or reversion (with change in margin debt signaling a...
Does low volume in currency exchange markets expose exploitable inefficiencies? In their August 2017 paper entitled “The Value of Volume in Foreign Exchange”, Antonio Gargano, Steven Riddiough and Lucio Sarno investigate whether currency trading volumes (including spot,...
Is market breadth a reliable indicator of future stock market returns? To investigate, we perform simple tests on four daily U.S. stock market breadth metrics: RSP-SPY – Total return for Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight...
Does the broad U.S. stock market, as represented by SPDR S&P 500 (SPY), exhibit reliable day-of-the-week and/or overnight return anomalies? To check, we consider three returns: Close-Open: measured from prior close to open. (For example,...
How many, and which, factors should investors include when constructing multi-factor smart beta portfolios? In their August 2017 paper entitled “How Many Factors? Does Adding Momentum and Volatility Improve Performance”, Mohammed Elgammal, Fatma Ahmed, David McMillan and Ali Al-Amari...
Are more data, higher levels of signal statistical significance and more sophisticated prediction models better for financial forecasting? In their August 2017 paper entitled “Practical Significance of Statistical Significance”, Ben Jacobsen, Alexander Molchanov and Cherry Zhang perform sensitivity testing...
Does simple asset price trend following based on 10-month simple moving average (SMA10) reliably boost the performance of retirement portfolios? In their July 2017 paper entitled “Can Sustainable Withdrawal Rates Be Enhanced by Trend Following?”, Andrew...
Do changes in the U.S. federal regulatory burden predict U.S. stock market returns? To check, we consider two measures of the regulatory burden: Annual number of pages in the Federal Register (FR) during 1936-2016 – “…in...
How serious is the snooping bias (p-hacking) derived from brute force mining of stock trading strategy variations? In their August 2017 paper entitled “p-Hacking: Evidence from Two Million Trading Strategies”, Tarun Chordia, Amit Goyal and Alessio Saretto test...
...while research generally supports belief in an intermediate-term momentum effect for equities, it is not obvious that the FUNDX mutual fund substantially exploits the effect. Investors may be able to capture more of the effect...
Does financial market volatility identify bubbles and predict subsequent crashes? In their April 2017 paper entitled “Can We Use Volatility to Diagnose Financial Bubbles? Lessons from 40 Historical Bubbles”, Didier Sornette, Peter Cauwels and Georgi Smilyanov examine price...