DIY Trend-Following Allocations: November 2023
Full exposure to domestic equities. Partial exposure to international equities. No exposure to REITs. Partial exposure to commodities. No exposure to intermediate-term bonds.
Doug Talks with Belle about 1042 QRP ESOP Solutions
In this episode host Belle Osvath, CFP® talks with Doug Pugliese who is the Head of 1042 QRP Strategies at Alpha Architect. They discuss 1042 exchanges which allow the owner of a closely held C-Corp to sell their equity to an employee stock purchase plan and defer long-term capital gains as long as they rollover the proceeds into a qualified investment. Doug talks about the benefit to a company and the employees when creating an ESOP and does an excellent job at breaking down the strategy behind the decision. Doug also identifies which business owners are ideal candidates for this type of exchange and discusses the limited investment options that business owners have historically faced and how his team is working to change that. If you have business owner clients our are just curious about this innovative approach to 1042 exchanges this is the show for you.
Value versus Values in ESG Investing
The relationship between financial markets and ESG investing is obscured by the lack of clarity regarding motivations for investing in ESG strategies. Is the motive to align the investor’s values with the ESG theme? Or is the ESG term a misnomer for a set of stocks that are systematically undervalued, for some reason as a function of its ESG characteristics?
Dissecting the Idiosyncratic Volatility Puzzle
Idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) is the volatility of a security that cannot be explained by overall market volatility—it is the risk unique to a particular security. IVOL contrasts with systematic risk, which is the risk that affects all securities in a market (such as changes in interest rates or inflation) and, therefore cannot be diversified away. On the other hand, the risks of high IVOL stocks can at least be reduced through diversification.
Executives vs. Chatbots in Earnings Conference Q&A
In this study, we introduce a novel measure of information content (Human-AI Differences, HAID) by exploiting the discrepancy between answers to questions at earnings calls provided by corporate executives and those given by several context-preserving Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, and an open source LLM.
Factor Investors: Momentum is Everywhere
The Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) paper on momentum established that an equity trading strategy consisting of buying past winners and selling past losers, reliably produced risk-adjusted excess returns. The Jegadeesh results have been replicated in international markets and across asset classes. As this evidence challenged and contradicted widely accepted notions of weak-form market efficiency, the academic community took notice and started churning out research. As a result, a very large number of academic studies were published on momentum. The article summarized here has conveniently summarized 47 articles deemed as the highest quality and published in either the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, or the Journal of Financial Economics, all three considered premier journals in the finance discipline. It is difficult to understate the importance of having a well-curated summary of momentum research. Keep it in your library.
Trend-Following Filters – Part 7
This article examines four digital filters commonly used for trend-following: moving average linear weighted moving average exponential smoothing time series momentum
Global Factor Performance: October 2023
Standardized Performance Factor Performance Factor Exposures Factor Premiums Factor Attribution Factor Data Downloads
Institutional Investing and Manager Forbearance
Forbearance is important and we argue that performance evaluation should be multifaceted, akin to a Bayesian decision-maker who conducts continued due diligence and updates beliefs about returns with process information.
International Value Stocks Offering “More Bang for the Buck”
Over the very long term, while value stocks have been less profitable and have had slower growth in earnings than growth stocks, they have provided higher returns.
DIY Trend-Following Allocations: October 2023
Do-It-Yourself trend-following asset allocation weights for the Robust Asset Allocation Index are posted.
The democratization of investing and the evolution of ETFs
The implications of the competitive landscape for ETFs are mixed. On one hand, they have truly democratized investing. Investors now have access to the benefits of financial markets in one instrument that provides diversification at very low fees. Recently advertised fees on broad-based bond funds have fallen to 3bps. On the other hand, ETF providers have been able to satisfy investor demand for increasingly specialized products even though the evidence suggests they underperform. Are investors becoming worse off due to the effectiveness of the marketing strategies by providers of specialized ETFs?
ESG Preferences Negatively Affecting Market Efficiency
While ESG investors can express their values through their investments, they should expect lower returns from their portfolios—though they also will be taking less investment risk.
Geographic Investing and Company Operations
The article explores the limitations of traditional country-level stock market indexes that are constructed based on the domicile of issuing firms.
The Research and Development Factor
The higher returns to high R&D stocks represent compensation for heightened systematic risk not captured in standard asset pricing models.
A New Wolf in Town? Pump-and-Dump Manipulation in Cryptocurrency Markets
Cryptocurrency and the various forms of infrastructure are currently in a stage of rapid innovation. If the manipulation embedded in PADs is widespread then the confidence in and integrity of the crypto market will suffer.
The Role of ESG in Equity Returns Across Private, Primary, and Secondary Markets
The continued popularity of sustainable strategies could create sufficient cash flows to offset the risk premium in the lower-scoring stocks, at least until an equilibrium is reached.
Trend Following and Momentum Turning Points
Trend follower nerd alert: This study is important because it offers a comprehensive analysis of TS momentum strategies, its unifying framework that links performance to underlying variables, and its practical implications for investors seeking to enhance their understanding of momentum investing and improve their portfolio performance.
Implications of Regime-Shifting Stock-Bond Correlation
The correlation between stocks and bonds should be a critical component of any asset allocation decision, as it impacts not only the overall risk of a diversified multi-asset class portfolio but also the risk premia one should expect to receive for taking risk in different asset classes. The problem for investors is that the correlation between stocks and bonds fluctuates extensively across time and economic regimes.
Global Factor Performance: September 2023
The following factor performance modules have been updated on our Index website.[ref]free access for financial professionals[/ref] Standardized Performance Factor Performance Factor Exposures Factor Premiums Factor Attribution [...]