Enhancing Momentum Strategies
Momentum investing remains a viable strategy. However, the way you construct and manage your momentum portfolio matters greatly.
The Hidden Effort Problem: Work more and get better results?
Increased executive effort correlates with positive earnings surprises, higher cumulative abnormal returns post-earnings announcements, and narrower credit default swap spreads. Moreover, portfolios constructed based on changes in executive effort demonstrate significant risk-adjusted returns, underscoring the tangible value of diligent leadership.
Raising Capital from Investor Syndicates with Strategic Communication
The structure of investor syndicates—hierarchical or flat—significantly impacts the flow of information and investment decisions. In hierarchical structures, differentiated incentives can lead to persuasive cascades, while flat structures promote truthful information sharing.
Unlocking Cross-Asset Potential: A New Approach to Portfolio Construction
Christian Goulding and Campbell Harvey, authors of the study "Investment Base Pairs," proposed a groundbreaking framework for portfolio construction that challenges traditional approaches in modern finance. Their research focused on leveraging cross-asset information to optimize investment strategies and improve returns across diverse asset classes. Here's an overview of their investigation, key findings, and takeaways for investors and advisors.
A Good Sketch is Better than a Long Speech
In the evolving landscape of financial technology, innovative methods are emerging to assess creditworthiness. One such approach involves analyzing borrowers' facial expressions during loan applications to predict delinquency risk. This study explores this novel intersection of psychology, machine learning, and finance.
Profitability Retrospective: Key Takeaways for Investors
Profitability subsumes all of the quality factor, explaining both the performance of the strategies the investment industry market and the factors that academics employ—none of the quality factors generated significant positive alpha relative to profitability, the other Fama and French factors, and momentum.
The Virtue of Complexity in Return Prediction
This article explores how researchers forecast market returns by aggregating expected returns from individual stocks.
Cut Through the Noise! These Two Factors Tend to Drive Portfolio Success
Let’s break down how to build a robust factor portfolio—without getting lost in the weeds. We investigate which equity factors have the strongest historical returns and diversification benefits from a long-only perspective.
The Aggregated Equity Risk Premium
This article explores how researchers forecast market returns by aggregating expected returns from individual stocks.
A New Approach to Regime Detection and Factor Timing
The financial research literature has found that the performance of assets (and factors) can vary substantially across regimes - factor premiums can be regime dependent. Unfortunately, the real-time identification of the current economic regime is one of the biggest challenges in finance.
Making Factor Strategies Work for Everyone
This article explores the difference between tradable and on-paper (theoretical) risk factors in investing. Risk factors are strategies that help explain stock market returns, but many work only in theory and not in real life.
Enhancing Industry Momentum Strategies: Finding Hidden Neighbors
The main benefit of constructing industry momentum portfolios based on standard ICS is that it is straightforward and reproducible. However, that benefit may come at the cost of accuracy and oversimplification of complex industry relationships between companies.
Investing Isn’t About Being Mostly Right
Investing isn’t about being mostly right. In fact you can be mostly wrong and beat portfolios that were mostly right! Today, we’ll explore how investors can potentially improve portfolio outcomes by targeting two seemingly contradictory but deeply complementary systems as outlined in the latest Mauboussin-Callahan paper, Probabilities & Payoffs: The Practicality and Psychology of Expected Value. But understanding this counterintuitive reality requires a shift in mindset—one that embraces uncertainty and focuses on the power of diversification.
Understanding What Drives Momentum in Global Stock Markets
When information about a company comes out gradually, investors might not react strongly, leading to momentum. Other factors, like how a company's value is perceived, also play a role, but to a lesser extent.
US Value Stocks Trading at Historically High Discounts
For equity investors there have been two major narratives over the last 17 calendar year period 2008-2024. The first is that US stocks have far outperformed international stocks. The other narrative has been the outperformance of growth stocks relative to value stocks.
Adverse Effects of Index Replication
The empirical research we have reviewed shows that the (hidden) costs of index construction and rebalancing policies to investors are about 10 times the expense ratios.
Anti-Dividend Investing: Yield Matters—But Not How You Think!
Dividends are the comfort food of investing. Who wouldn’t love feeling like they’re getting a seemingly “free” payout just for holding onto a stock? As with all good things, there's a little more—perhaps a whole lot more—to the story. Here’s why: even in a tax-free setting, selling stocks before dividend payouts can lead to abnormal returns.
What is Trend Following? A Painful Journey to Smarter Investing
Trend following, at its core, is a strategy where investors buy an asset when it's going up and sell when it’s going down. But unlike panic-driven investors who sell at the worst possible moment, trend followers adhere to a rules-based approach in an attempt to remove emotion from the equation.
Valuations Reflect U.S. Exceptionalism
US exceptionalism provided the same explanation for the outperformance of US stocks in the 1990s. However, that regime changed. From 2000-2007, while the S&P 500 Index returned just 1.9% per annum (underperforming riskless one-month Treasury bills by 1.3% per annum), the MSCI EAFE Index returned 5.6% per annum, and the MSCI Emerging Markets Index returned 15.3% per annum.
Listing Domicile Driving Valuations
The listing domicile explained about 50% of the valuation gap. In other words, US-listed stocks are substantially more expensive than internationally listed stocks for no reason other than the place of listing.