Tail Hedging Is Not As Easy As You Think
Convexity can provide explosive payoffs from unlikely events. It’s a powerful weapon to wield, but like most weapons, it could be inefficient or even dangerous in the hands of the untrained.
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.
Focus on Income Can Undermine Returns: The Case of Covered Calls
Covered calls implemented to deliver higher derivative income should be expected to have (1) lower total returns, (2) higher tax realizations along the path, and (3) a more negatively skewed return profile. Investors who allocate to these strategies for their income alone, without accounting for these other considerations, might have made a devil’s bargain
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.
Volatility scaling is useful for factor timing
This paper investigates the effects of volatility scaling on factor portfolio performance and factor timing.
Momentum Everywhere, Including Emerging Markets
Atilgan et al. contribute to the momentum literature with “Momentum and Downside Risk in Emerging Markets.”
Has the Stock Market Systematically Changed?
This time is almost always different, it seems, but the data suggest that things are typically always the same: chaotic and volatile. Stock market investors should be prepared for large short-term moves in stocks and they should be skeptical of narratives suggesting a causal relationship between environmental variables and future volatility.
Are Stock Market Bubbles Identifiable?
Robin Greenwood, Andrei Shleifer, and Yang You authors of the study “Bubbles for Fama”, published in the January 2019 issue of the Journal of Financial Economics evaluated Fama's claim that stock prices do not exhibit price bubbles. Based on a fixed threshold for the industry price increases (e.g., a 100 percent price run-up during two consecutive years) to filter their events and to analyze what happens afterward, they examined U.S. industry returns over the period 1926‒2014 (covering 40 episodes) and international sector returns (1985‒2014).
The Performance of Volatility-Managed Portfolios
As far back as 1976, with the publication of Fischer Black’s “Studies of Stock Price Volatility Changes” financial economists have known that volatility and returns [...]
More on the Factor Investing Replication Debate
Open Source Cross-Sectional Asset Pricing Andrew Chen and Tom ZimmermannWorking paperA version of this paper can be found here What are the research questions? There has [...]
Low Volatility Factor Investing: Risk-Based or Behavioral-Based or Both?
Betting against correlation: Testing theories of the low-risk effect Cliff Asness, Andrea Frazzini, Niels Joachim Gormsen, Lasse Heje PedersenJournal of Financial EconomicsA version of this [...]
Do Option Prices Inform Stock Returns?
In perfectly efficient markets, option prices should not convey any new information or contribute to the price discovery of underlying assets. However, if markets are [...]
Skulls, Financial Turbulence and Risk Management
Mark Kritzman and Yuanzhen LiFinancial Analyst Journal, 2010A version of this paper can be found hereWant to read our summaries of academic finance papers? Check out [...]
Volatility Expectations and Returns
A large body of research, including the 2017 study “Tail Risk Mitigation with Managed Volatility Strategies” by Anna Dreyer and Stefan Hubrich, demonstrates that while [...]