Investing Research Articles

Is periodic rebalancing of a stock portfolio advantageous? In his May 2021 paper entitled “Does Volatility Harvesting Really Work?”, Magnus Pedersen compares performances of periodic rebalancing versus no rebalancing (buy-and-hold) for thousands of randomly constructed and initially equal-weighted portfolios of U.S. stocks. He tries different numbers of holdings, different start/end dates and different rebalancing intervals… Keep Reading

Is the known weakening of stock anomalies after publication due more to in-sample overfitting by researchers or post-publication exploitation by arbitrageurs (market adaptation)? In their May 2021 paper entitled “Why and How Systematic Strategies Decay”, Antoine Falck, Adam Rej and David Thesmar examine the typical post-publication risk-adjusted performance (Sharpe ratio) of U.S. stock anomalies. They… Keep Reading

Can investors detect when commodity futures momentum, value and carry (basis) strategies are crowded and therefore likely to generate relatively weak returns? In the March 2021 version of their paper entitled “Crowding and Factor Returns”, Wenjin Kang, Geert Rouwenhorst and Ke Tang examine how crowding by commodity futures traders affects expected returns for momentum, value… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/24/21 through 5/28/21. 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 inquired whether a longer test of the “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” (SACEMS) is feasible using mutual funds rather than exchange-traded funds (ETF) as asset class proxies. To investigate, we consider the following set of mutual funds (partly adapted from the paper summarized in “Asset Allocation Combining Momentum, Volatility, Correlation and Crash Protection”): Vanguard Total Stock… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/17/21 through 5/21/21. 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.

Does the recency effect evident for U.S. stock returns carry over to stocks globally? In their May 2021 paper entitled “Chronological Return Ordering and the Cross-Section of International Stock Returns”, Nusret Cakici and Adam Zaremba examine whether the recency effects holds among stocks worldwide. Their measure of recency (Chronological Return Ordering, CRO) for each stock… Keep Reading

Do naive investors overvalue (undervalue) stocks with relatively high (low) recent returns, thereby causing exploitable overpricing (underpricing)? In the April 2019 version of his paper entitled “The Impact of Recency Effects on Stock Market Prices”, Hannes Mohrschladt devises and tests a measure of this recency effect based on correlation between daily returns during a month… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 5/10/21 through 5/14/21. 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.

Does the conventional wisdom to “Sell in May” (and “Buy in November”, hence also the term “Halloween Effect”) work over the long run, perhaps due to biological/psychological effects of seasons (Seasonal Affective Disorder)? To check, we turn to the long run dataset of Robert Shiller. This data set includes monthly levels of the S&P Composite… Keep Reading