Factor Timing Investigation: Interest Rates, Value Spreads, and Factor Premiums
Now that the Federal Reserve has begun the process of raising interest rates, and has announced their intention to begin to unwind their policy of [...]
Academic Research Insight: Does Gender Matter on Wall Street?
Title: GENDER AND CONNECTIONS AMONG WALL STREET ANALYSTS Authors: LILY FANG AND STERLING HUANG Publication: THE REVIEW OF FINANCIAL STUDIES, V.30, SEPTEMBER 2017 (version here) What are the [...]
Ben Graham on Passive Investing
The passive investing revolution is truly upon us. Ever since 1975, when Jack Bogle introduced the first index mutual fund, passive indexing has marched on [...]
What Happens When you Data Mine 2 million Fundamental Quant Strategies
As we have mentioned before, here, here and here, there is overwhelming evidence that the number of stock anomalies in the universe is much lower than [...]
Support Academic Research by Filling Out The Financial Analysts Survey
Prof. Richard Price, an old friend, co-author, and Alpha Architect advisory board member, is working on some cool new co-authored research that requires audience participation! [...]
Academic Research Insight: Do Dividends Still Matter?
Title: WHAT DIFFERENCE DO DIVIDENDS MAKE? Authors: C. Mitchell Conover, CFA, CIPM, Gerald R. Jensen, CFA and Marc W. Simpson, CFA Publication: Financial Analysts Journal, [...]
Trend-Following with Valeriy Zakamulin: Trading in Various Financial Markets (Part 8)
In our final blog post, that finishes the trend-following series, we briefly review the results of the forward-tests of the profitability of various trend following [...]
How ETF Trading Works: A Deep Dive Into ETF Market Making
Many in the financial service industry are now using ETFs to build portfolios. Some love the tax-efficiency of ETFs relative to mutual funds, while others use [...]
Academic Research Insight: Does one size retail financial advice fits all?
Title: RETAIL FINANCIAL ADVICE: DOES ONE SIZE FITS ALL? Authors: FOERSTER S., LINNAINMAA J.T., MELZER B.T., PREVITERO A. Publication: JOURNAL OF FINANCE, V.72, AUGUST 2017 (version here ) What [...]
Trend-Following with Valeriy Zakamulin: Trading the S&P 500 Index (Part 7)
The Standard and Poor's (S&P) 500 index is a value-weighted stock index based on the market capitalizations of 500 large companies in the US. This [...]
Short Term Momentum and Long Term Reversals Can Coexist
In their seminal 1993 paper, “Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency,” Narasimhan Jegadeesh and Sheridan Titman reported significant returns [...]
Academic Research Insight: Global Equities and Overreaction
Title: OVERREACTION AND THE CROSS-SECTION OF RETURNS: INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE Authors: Douglas W. Blackburn, Nusret Cakici Publication: Journal of Empirical Finance 42 (2017) 1-14 https://ssrn.com/abstract=2800188 What [...]
Trend-Following: Testing the Profitability of Trading Rules (Part 6)
The difficulty in testing the profitability of trend-following rules stems from the fact that the procedure of testing involves either a single- or multi-variable optimization. [...]
Portfolio Allocations using Enterprise Multiples (and others)
A common question asked in the factor investing field is the following -- "how much of the model's performance is driven by sector allocations, and how much is driven by security selection?" Our answer is to simply buy Value stocks or Momentum stocks, regardless of sector constraints. Why? Well a nice anecdote (but not data) is that investing in "cheap" technology stocks was not a great idea in the internet bubble crash.
Academic Research Insight: Abusing ETFs
Title: ABUSING ETFs Authors: UTPAL BHATTACHARYA, BENJAMIN LOOS, STEFFEN MEYER, ANDREAS HACKETAL Publication: REVIEW OF FINANCE, VOL.21, 2017 (version here) What are the research questions? [...]
Trend-Following with Valeriy Zakamulin: Performance Measurement and Outperformance Tests (Part 5)
We consider an investor and a financial market that consists of only two assets: one risky asset and one safe (or risk-fee) asset. An example [...]
Academic Research Insight: Can Bond Portfolios Be “Factorized”?
Title: Factor Investing in the Bond Market Authors: Patrick Houweling and Jeroen van Zundert Publication: Financial Analysts Journal, Vol. 3 No. 2, 2017 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2516322) What [...]
Trend-Following with Valeriy Zakamulin: Anatomy of Trading Rules (Part 4)
In our context, a technical trading indicator can be considered as a combination of a specific technical trading rule with a particular moving average of [...]
TREND-FOLLOWING WITH VALERIY ZAKAMULIN: TECHNICAL TRADING RULES (PART 3)
A trend following strategy is based on switching between a financial asset and cash depending on whether the asset prices trend upward or downward. Specifically, [...]
Diversification Benefits of Time Series Momentum
Similar to some better-known factors like size and value, time-series momentum is a factor that historically has demonstrated above average excess returns. Time-series momentum, also called trend-momentum or absolute momentum, is measured by a portfolio long assets that have had recent positive returns and short assets that have had recent negative returns. Compare this to the traditional (cross-sectional) momentum factor that considers recent asset performance only relative to other assets. The academic evidence suggests that inclusion of a strategy targeting time-series momentum in a portfolio improves the portfolio’s risk-adjusted returns.