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The Best Strategies for Dealing with Inflation? Factors and Trend-Following

By |January 24th, 2022|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Trend Following, Basilico and Johnsen, Academic Research Insight, Tactical Asset Allocation Research|

Inflation -- what's that? ... It has been quite a while since inflation has been considered a problem. Today, however, the angst surrounding the possibility of a resurgence in inflation is real and “top of mind” for investors.   If the current fear becomes a reality, how should investors react? What strategies and asset classes perform well in a rising inflationary environment? If inflation does resurge beyond a temporary phase, how should investors restructure or reposition their portfolios? The purpose of this article is to provide context for those decisions.

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Factor Investing in Sovereign Bond Markets

By |January 13th, 2022|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Larry Swedroe, Academic Research Insight, Fixed Income, Value Investing Research, Momentum Investing Research|

The reported results we covered have important implications for investors in terms of portfolio construction, risk monitoring, and manager selection. Because these common factors explain almost all the returns of bond portfolios, investors should construct their bond portfolios using low-cost, passively (systematically) managed funds with these factors in mind and then carefully monitor their exposure to these systematic risks.

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Asset Allocation and Private Market (i.e. illiquid) Investing

By |January 10th, 2022|Private Equity, Liquidity Factor, Research Insights, Factor Investing, Basilico and Johnsen, Academic Research Insight, Tactical Asset Allocation Research|

Allocations to illiquid assets have become increasingly popular requiring asset managers to consider portfolio-wide liquidity characteristics. Although determining the price of illiquidity is a challenge for investors, the construction of a portfolio that includes liquidity constraints can be even more daunting. How do we optimize asset allocation with liquidity as a significant constraint on the portfolio?

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Understanding Momentum Investing

By |December 30th, 2021|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Larry Swedroe, Academic Research Insight, Momentum Investing Research|

The main takeaway for investors is that Kelly, Moskowitz, and Pruitt demonstrated that past return characteristics are strongly predictive of a stock’s realized exposures to common risk factors, providing direct evidence that price trend strategies are in part explainable as compensation for common factor exposures—past returns predict betas on factors and those factors have high average returns.

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The Illiquidity Discount is an Opportunity Cost

By |December 28th, 2021|Liquidity Factor, Research Insights, Factor Investing, Basilico and Johnsen, Academic Research Insight|

Private investment opportunities seem to have been filling investors' portfolios. These investment vehicles come with a discount to the assets value to pay investors for taking on illiquidity risk. Readers of this article are treated to the development of a theory and a practical model that quantifies the illiquidity discount.

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Value investing: What history says about five-year periods after valuation peaks

By |December 21st, 2021|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Value Investing Research, Tactical Asset Allocation Research|

Value stocks are historically cheap compared to the past. Given this fact, a natural question is the following, "After the last two times Value had a "peak" of the factor being cheap, how did it do the subsequent five years?"

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The Relationship Between the Value Premium and Interest Rates

By |December 16th, 2021|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Larry Swedroe, Academic Research Insight, Value Investing Research, Tactical Asset Allocation Research|

We've been suffering through the deepest and longest drawdown in values history. Looking for a scapegoat to explain the lackluster performance many have pointed to low interest rates as the root cause of the underperformance. The question is have interest rates impacted value in the past?

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ESG Investing: Dissecting Green Returns

By |December 13th, 2021|ESG, Research Insights, Basilico and Johnsen, Academic Research Insight, Value Investing Research, Momentum Investing Research|

In theory green stocks should have lower expected returns, this however, is not what we've seen. So the question is what has caused the outperformance of green stocks? And has that outperformance cost value investors their returns?

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Does the Market Efficiently Price the Value of Brands?

By |December 9th, 2021|Intangibles, Research Insights, Factor Investing, Larry Swedroe|

Despite the fact that a company’s internally generated intangible investments create future value, under current U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, internally developed intangibles are not included in reported assets. While research and development is an important intangible asset, so too is branding. Omission of an increasingly important class of assets reduces the usefulness and relevance of financial statement analysis that uses book value. 

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Value and Momentum Factors? Naw, Focus on the Music Factor!

By |December 6th, 2021|Relative Sentiment, Research Insights, Basilico and Johnsen, Academic Research Insight, Behavioral Finance|

Can market sentiment be derived from the tunes that your fellow countrymen are listening to? According to the research summarized here you'll find that there is important market information buried in the listening habits of Spotify users.

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Size, Value, Profitability, and Investment Factors in International Stocks

By |December 2nd, 2021|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Larry Swedroe, Academic Research Insight, Value Investing Research, Size Investing Research|

Using data on 65,000 stocks from 23 countries, they evaluated the performance of the Fama-French factors, examining the factor premia in global markets to verify their robustness across different company size categories and geographical regions. Their data sample covered the period 1987-2019.

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The Value of the Value Factor: Cheaper now than a year ago?

By |November 23rd, 2021|Research Insights, Value Investing Research, Tactical Asset Allocation Research|

About a year and a half ago, after one of the worst relative drawdowns the value factor has ever seen, I wrote a piece showing the value factor was cheap relative to history. Since then, value strategies are on a solid run (look at pretty much any type of value strategy and I think you'd agree). Today? The valuation spread between the cheapest 10% and the universe of stocks is cheaper. We are at levels beyond 1999 by some measures.

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Chasing Low Beta Loses Alpha

By |November 19th, 2021|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Larry Swedroe, Academic Research Insight, Low Volatility Investing|

One of the big problems for the first formal asset pricing model developed by financial economists, the CAPM, was that it predicts a positive relationship between risk and return. However, empirical studies have found the actual relationship to be basically flat, or even negative. Over the last 50 years, the most “defensive” (low-volatility or low-beta, low-risk) stocks have delivered both higher returns and higher risk-adjusted returns than the most “aggressive” (high-volatility, high-risk) stocks.

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Factor Investing Deep Dive with Jack Vogel

By |November 12th, 2021|Factor Investing, Podcasts and Video, Value Investing Research, Momentum Investing Research|

Ben and Cameron, which host the excellent Rational Reminder podcast, sit down with Jack Vogel and go through a laundry list of factor investing questions

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The Vanishing Illiquidity Premium

By |November 11th, 2021|Crisis Alpha, Liquidity Factor, Research Insights, Factor Investing, Larry Swedroe, Academic Research Insight|

Liquidity—the ability to buy and sell significant quantities of a given asset quickly, at low cost, and without a major price concession—is valuable to investors. Therefore, they demand a premium as compensation for the greater [...]

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The Momentum Factor is Driven by Behavioral Bias, Not Risk

By |November 9th, 2021|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Academic Research Insight, Behavioral Finance, Momentum Investing Research|

Momentum, Reversals, and Investor Clientele Andy Chui, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, and Sheridan TitmanReview of Financial Studies, 2021A version of this paper can be found hereWant to read our summaries of academic finance papers? Check out our Academic Research [...]

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Global Factor Performance: November 2021

By |November 8th, 2021|Index Updates, Research Insights, Factor Investing, Tool Updates, Tactical Asset Allocation Research|

The following factor performance modules have been updated on our Index website.[ref]free access for financial professionals[/ref] Standardized PerformanceFactor PerformanceFactor ExposuresFactor PremiumsFactor AttributionFactor Data Downloads

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Do factors have a role in asset allocation?

By |October 26th, 2021|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Basilico and Johnsen, Academic Research Insight, Tactical Asset Allocation Research|

The Role of Factors in Asset Allocation Mark KritzmanJournal of Portfolio ManagementA version of this paper can be found hereWant to read our summaries of academic finance papers? Check out our Academic Research Insight category What [...]

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