Investing Research Articles

Does adding a position stop-loss rule improve the performance of the “Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy” (SACEMS) by avoiding some downside volatility? SACEMS each months picks winners from among the a set of eight asset class exchange-traded fund (ETF) proxies plus cash based on past returns over a specified interval. To investigate the value of… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 10/18/21 through 10/22/21. 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.

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 10/11/21 through 10/15/21. 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 technically adjusted Seasonal Timing Strategy popularized some years ago in Sy Harding’s Street Smart Report Online (now unavailable due to Mr. Harding’s death) generate attractive performance? This strategy combines “the market’s best average calendar entry [October 16] and exit [April 20] days with a technical indicator, the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD).” According… Keep Reading

A subscriber asked whether risk assets tend to struggle for about two years after low values of the ratio of corporate debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). To investigate, we use Non-financial Corporate Debt Securities and Loans as a proxy for corporate debt. Both debt and GDP series are quarterly, seasonally adjusted and have release… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 10/4/21 through 10/8/21. 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.

What is the best way to understand and anticipate variations in equity factor returns? Past research emphasizes factor return connections to business cycle variables or measures of investor sentiment (with little success). In his September 2021 paper entitled “The Quant Cycle”, David Blitz analyzes factor returns themselves to understand their variations, arguing that behavioral rather… Keep Reading

Do equity premium predictors published in the past still work after extending their respective discovery samples through 2020? In their September 2021 paper entitled “A Comprehensive Look at the Empirical Performance of Equity Premium Prediction II”, Amit Goyal, Ivo Welch and Athanasse Zafirov reexamine the power of 29 variables found to predict the equity premium… Keep Reading

What is the best way to conduct quantitative investment research? In his September 2021 presentation package entitled “Escaping The Sisyphean Trap: How Quants Can Achieve Their Full Potential”, Marcos Lopez de Prado outlines the optimal way to tackle such research. Based on his experience, he concludes that:

Does variation in the number of reported cases of COVID-19 predict near-term asset returns? To investigate, we look for a test acknowledging that the available sample is short and very noisy. Specifically: To suppress noise, we use the 7-day moving average of U.S. COVID-19 cases. To avoid measurement overlap, we calculate weekly changes in this… Keep Reading