Factor Investing

Mitigating Risks with Factor Strategies

The following exhibit, which is useful to the subject of mitigating risks with factor strategies, provides the total return of the four benchmark portfolios and the five anomaly portfolios.

The Value Factor and Deleveraging

How do you separate the signal from the noise? To have confidence that a factor premium, or strategy, isn’t just the result of data mining - a lucky/random outcome - we recommended that you should require evidence that the premium has been not only persistent over long periods of time and across economic regimes, but also pervasive across sectors, countries, geographic regions and even asset classes; robust to various definitions (for example, there has been both a value and a momentum premium using many different metrics); survives transactions costs; and has intuitive risk- or behavioral-based explanations for the premium to persist.

Automation and Asset Pricing Theory

In this article about asset pricing theory, we examine the research on the impact of technological advances that displace human labor in favor of machine capital to asset pricing.

The Performance of Multi-Factor Long-Short Portfolios in Various Economic Regimes

To determine if a multi-factor approach has provided diversification benefits in terms of exposure to economic cycle risks, the research team at Counterpoint evaluated returns to multifactor long-short strategies, stocks, and 1-month T-bills in a variety of economic conditions (recession or no recession, high or no high inflation, and stagflation) over the period July 1963-August 2022.

Bigger is Not Always Better in Asset Management

Pastor, Stambaugh, and Taylor (2015) and Zhu (2018) provide significant evidence of decreasing returns to scale (DRS) at both the fund and industry levels. The authors examine the robustness of their inferences after Adams, Hayunga, and Mansi (2021) critique the above two studies.

The “Resurrected” Size Effect and Monetary Policy

Given that tightening monetary policy increases economic risks, Simpson and Grossman provided compelling evidence of a risk explanation for the size factor. For those investors who engage in tactical asset allocation strategies (market timing), their evidence suggests that it might be possible to exploit the information. Before jumping to that conclusion, I would caution that because markets are forward-looking, they should anticipate periods of Fed tightening and the heightened risks of small stocks.

Trend Following and Relative Sentiment: Complementary Factors

Since it is likely that both the Relative Sentiment and Trend Following strategies will underperform at some points in the future, “a 50-50 combination of TF and RS might reduce the emotional volatility an investor may experience from holding only the underperforming strategy.”

Does Momentum work in Option Markets?

This paper explores the question of option momentum by examining what the research says about the performance of option investments across different stocks.

The Role of the Secular Decline in Interest Rates in Asset Pricing Anomalies

Jules van Binsbergen, Liang Ma and Michael Schwert, authors of the September 2022 study “The Factor Multiverse: The Role of Interest Rates in Factor Discovery,” posed an interesting question: Are the findings of at least some of the reported anomalies the direct result of the 40-year secular decline in global interest rates and thus not really anomalies?

Market Risk and Speculative Factors

Soroush Ghazi and Mark Schneider authors of the August 2022 study “Market Risk and Speculation Factors” decomposed the excess market return (the equity risk premium) into speculative (in the simple sense that it is negative, reflecting a premium investors pay to hold assets that are more subject to speculative demand) and non-speculative, or risk (in the simple sense that it is positive, a necessary characteristic for a factor to reflect compensation for risk) components.

Momentum Factor Investing: 30 years of Out of Sample Data

In this article, the author examines the research published over the last 30 years on momentum and its theoretical credibility. One of the original momentum articles was published by Jegadeesh and Titman in 1993, and is considered the seminal work on the topic. The research review contained in this publication begins with the 1993 work and confines itself to only the highest quality journals among the plethora of work that has been published on momentum.

Mind the Momentum Gap to Improve Performance

This article discusses the academic research about the Momentum Gap and the role that its predictive potential may have in reducing momentum crashes, hence possibly improving performance.

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