DIY Trend-Following Allocations: March 2024
Full exposure to domestic equities. Full exposure to international equities. Partial exposure to REITs. No exposure to commodities. Partial exposure to intermediate-term bonds.
Cut Your Losses and Let Profits Run?
Be careful before acting on what is considered to be conventional wisdom. Make sure it’s supported by empirical evidence. In this case, the evidence makes clear that “cut your losses and let your profits run” should not be conventional wisdom.
Financial Literacy and Financial Resilience: Evidence from Italy
The paper aims to contribute to the literature by providing insights into the current state of financial literacy in Italy, its implications for financial well-being and resilience, and the demographic disparities therein.
Lottery Preference and Biotech Stocks: Trust the Financials, Not the Science
Making a bet on biotech/pharma firms that have not yet achieved significant revenue is the equivalent of buying a lottery ticket—with the same poor risk/return relationship.
Self-Declared Benchmarks and Fund Manager Intent: “Cheating” or Competing?
The paper aims to provide insights into the dynamics of benchmark selection, the effectiveness of Relative Performance Evaluation ( RPE ) incentivization, and the broader implications for fund performance and market competition.
On the Persistence of Growth and Value Stocks
While analysts underwrite high growth for companies that have grown quickly and slow growth for companies that have grown slowly in the past, a large body of evidence demonstrates that reversion to the mean of both positive and negative abnormal earnings growth is the norm.
Can ChatGPT Improve Your Stock Picks?
One use of the NLP (natural language processing) features of ChatGPT is to search out patterns in the immense amounts of news, data and other sources of information about specific stocks, and then efficiently convert them into summaries valuable for all types of investors. Can this be accomplished with useful results? The authors use the Q2_2023 period to test performance around earnings announcements. Earnings announcements and earnings surprises are informationally rich as well as challenging events for investors to analyze.
Band of Brothers Attacking Short Sellers: Game Stop for Hedge Funds
Advisors and investors should be aware that fund families that invest systematically have found ways to incorporate the research findings on the limits to arbitrage and the evolving changes we have discussed to improve returns over those of a pure index replication strategy. It seems likely this will become increasingly important, as the markets have become less liquid, increasing the limits to arbitrage and allowing for more overpricing.
Global Factor Performance: February 2024
The following factor performance modules have been updated on our Index website.
Professional Athletes and Money Skills
Until that framework is defined, an assessment of the financial acumen of professional athletes will remain unfocused. This research addresses that gap.
Trend to Passive Investing Negatively Affecting Active Funds
While the evidence makes clear that active management is a loser’s game (one that it is possible to win but so unlikely you should not try), we don’t want active managers to disappear. Hope should continue to triumph over evidence, wisdom, and experience because active managers help eliminate market anomalies and inefficiencies created by the misbehavior of investors (such as noise traders). That helps to ensure that capital is allocated efficiently.
DIY Trend-Following Allocations: February 2024
Full exposure to domestic equities. Full exposure to international equities. Partial exposure to REITs. No exposure to commodities. Partial exposure to intermediate-term bonds.
The Smart Money Can Buy Stocks, but They Can’t Sell Them
The paper aims to investigate whether experienced institutional portfolio managers (PMs) exhibit behavioral biases in their decision-making processes, specifically focusing on the selling decisions.
Moving Average Distance and Time-Series Momentum
For investors that use trend-following strategies, Avramov, Kaplanski, and Subrhmanyam provided new evidence supporting momentum strategies and showed that the distance between short- and longer-term momentum signals provides additional explanatory power in the cross-section of equity returns.
Here are the themes found in financial planning research. What’s missing?
In this academic article, the authors pull together an analysis of the types of thematic structures found most often in financial planning studies as well as the theories most often referenced.
Outperforming Cap- (Value-) Weighted and Equal-Weighted Portfolios
Antonello Cirulli and Patrick Walker, authors of the December 2023 study “Outperforming Equal Weighting,” examined whether equally weighted portfolios could be enhanced by avoiding negative exposure to some of the most prominent factor anomalies documented in asset pricing literature.
Financial Literacy in the US…Doesn’t look great!
This paper aims to analyze financial literacy in the United States, utilizing the most recent data from the National Financial Capability Study (NFCS) collected in 2021 by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Investor Education Foundation. The paper focuses on the importance of financial literacy, particularly in the context of the economic conditions in the US, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, and changes in the financial system.
Peer-Reviewed Theory and Expected Stock Returns
The risk-based explanation provided by a peer-based review is a necessary ingredient for considering investment, but it is not a sufficient ingredient.
Global Factor Performance: January 2024
Standardized Performance Factor Performance Factor Exposures Factor Premiums Factor Attribution Factor Data Downloads
Is a quantitative defensive factor strategy feasible? Yes.
We examine the research around the question of what the proper framework for building a defensive factor strategy is.