Investing Research Articles

Does multi-class investing boost performance for sophisticated investors such as educational endowments? In his June 2020 paper entitled “Endowment Performance and the Demise of the Multi-Asset-Class Model”, Richard Ennis examines recent performance of educational endowment funds, with focus on allocations to alternative assets. Using performance data from a report on 774 university endowments and from… Keep Reading

Are widely accepted equity factor exposures available in fact to investors via “smart beta” mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETF)? In their May 2020 paper entitled “Smart Beta Made Smart”, Andreas Johansson, Riccardo Sabbatucci and Andrea Tamoni test effectiveness of individual U.S. equity mutual funds and ETFs and combinations of these funds for exploiting several… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/22/20 through 6/26/20. 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.

Is there a way to mitigate adverse impact of price trajectory turning points (trend changes) on performance of intrinsic (absolute or time series) momentum strategies? In their May 2020 paper entitled “Breaking Bad Trends”, Ashish Garg, Christian Goulding, Campbell Harvey and Michele Mazzoleni measure impact of turning points on time series momentum strategy performance across… Keep Reading

Does adding an exchange-traded fund (ETF) or note (ETN) to the Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) boost performance via consideration of more trending/diversifying options? To investigate, we add the following 22 ETF/ETN asset class proxies one at a time to the base set and measure effects on the Top 1, equally weighted (EW)… Keep Reading

Are all of the potentially trending/diversifying asset class proxies used in the Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) necessary? Might one or more of them actually be harmful to performance? To investigate, we each month rank the nine SACEMS assets based on past return with one excluded (nine separate test series) and reform the… Keep Reading

The middle of the year might be a time for funds to dress their windows and investors to review and revise portfolios. The 4th of July celebration might engender optimism among U.S. investors. Are there any reliable patterns in daily U.S. stock market returns around mid-year and the 4th of July? To check, we analyze… Keep Reading

Is systematically selling covered call options on equity indexes, as implemented by exchange-traded funds (ETF), attractive? To investigate, we consider four equity covered call ETFs: Invesco S&P 500 BuyWrite ETF (PBP) – seeks to track the CBOE S&P 500 BuyWrite Index (BXM). Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF (HSPX) – seeks to track the CBOE… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 6/15/20 through 6/19/20. 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.

A subscriber requested review of a strategy that seeks to exploit “Sell in May” by switching between risk-on assets during November-April and risk-off assets during May-October, with assets specified as follows: Risk-on – SPDR S&P 500 (SPY), iShares Russell 2000 Index (IWM) and PowerShares DWA Technical Leaders (PDP). Risk-off – iShares Barclays 20+ Year Treas Bond (TLT)… Keep Reading