Inflation Investing

Comparing past and present inflation rates can be tricky

By |March 20th, 2023|Inflation Investing, Research Insights, Basilico and Johnsen, Academic Research Insight|

The objective of this article is to build better estimates of CPI headline and core inflation values so inflation comparisons over time are more reliable.  The run-up in inflation we are currently experiencing is difficult to contextualize because it is inconsistent with past practices, weights on expenditures have changed, and the treatment of housing costs.

Can We Measure Inflation with Twitter

By |July 18th, 2022|Inflation Investing, Research Insights, Factor Investing, Basilico and Johnsen, Academic Research Insight|

Drawing on Italian tweets, we employ textual data and machine learning techniques to build new real-time measures of consumers’ inflation expectations. First, we select keywords to identify tweets related to prices and expectations thereof. Second, we build a set of daily measures of inflation expectations around the selected tweets, combining the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with a dictionary-based approach, using manually labeled bi-grams and tri-grams. Finally, we show that Twitter-based indicators are highly correlated with both monthly survey-based and daily market-based inflation expectations. Our new indicators anticipate consumers’ expectations, proving to be a good real-time proxy, and provide additional information beyond market-based expectations, professional forecasts, and realized inflation. The results suggest that Twitter can be a new timely source for eliciting beliefs.

Bond Investing in Inflationary Times

By |April 14th, 2022|Inflation Investing, Research Insights, Larry Swedroe, Academic Research Insight, Fixed Income|

As the chief research officer of Buckingham Strategic Partners, the issue I am being asked to address most often is about fixed income strategies when yields are at historically low levels and inflation risk is heightened due to the unprecedented increase in money creation (through quantitative easing), the extraordinary expansionary fiscal spending around the globe, and the war in Ukraine driving prices higher (especially for food and energy). As always, to answer the question we turn first to the academic evidence on which investments in general provide the best hedges against inflation.

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