Power of Skewness and Kurtosis to Predict Stock Returns
August 4, 2011 - Technical Trading
Many studies rely on the first moment (mean) of historical asset return distributions and/or the second moment (variance or standard deviation) to predict future returns. Are the third (skewness, indicating left-right tail asymmetry) and fourth (kurtosis, indicating fat-tailedness) moments of return distributions useful for predicting returns? In the July 2011 update of their paper entitled “Do Realized Skewness and Kurtosis Predict the Cross-Section of Equity Returns?”, Diego Amaya, Peter Christoffersen, Kris Jacobs and Aurelio Vasquez investigate whether decile sorts of individual stocks based on variance, skewness and kurtosis of intraday stock returns over the past week significantly predict returns the next week. Using past-week averages of daily realized volatility, skewness, and kurtosis computed from prices at five-minute intervals, and associated firm characteristics, for a broad sample of U.S. stocks over the period January 1993 through September 2008 (over two million firm-week observations), they find that: Keep Reading