Alpha Architect

Options Hedging & Leveraged ETFs in Market Swings

By Andrea Barbon|June 1st, 2022|Options, Research Insights, Guest Posts, Academic Research Insight, ETF Investing|

Earlier this year, GameStop stock rose like crazy in only a few hours with the effects of broker-dealer options hedging spurred by retail investor buying pressure. And from February to March 2020, options trading activity was also pointed to as a contributor to stock swings in the Covid-19 selloff. The market dropped 30% and then recovered quickly over the following weeks. It has been documented that the need for market makers to hedge their positions with options (given rapid changes in stock prices) can contribute to market and stock price swings. However, might there be other factors also at play in these types of stock and market fluctuations?

Life Insurance Instruments May Help Improve After-Tax Wealth

By Rajiv Rebello|May 25th, 2022|Research Insights, Guest Posts, Tax Efficient Investing|

Fee-only fiduciary advisors often summarily dismiss the use of life insurance solutions as financial planning tools—perhaps due to past experiences trying to get clients out of poorly structured, high expense policies. In this post, Colva Actuarial Services and Colva Capital principal Rajiv Rebello explains how fiduciary advisors can properly structure life insurance products and utilize low-expense/no-commission products to provide better after-tax diversification and returns for the fixed income portion of their clients’ portfolios as opposed to investing in bonds directly.

An Introduction to Investing in Carbon Markets

By Adam Solomon|March 10th, 2022|ESG, Research Insights, Guest Posts, Other Insights|

Carbon markets are quickly making their way to the forefront of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing, as well as the finance community as a whole. The Kraneshares Global Carbon ETF, (Ticker: KRBN) (whose holdings I’ll dive into shortly) was one of the top 5 performing ETFs in 2021 on a % return basis (Ferringer, Best performing ETFs of the Year - etf.com). However, it doesn’t appear that 2021 was a one-hit-wonder for Carbon Markets, but instead, the beginning of a new and very real trend.

ETF Tax Efficiency isn’t Always Efficient

By Sean Hegarty|February 25th, 2022|Research Insights, Guest Posts, Tax Efficient Investing, ETF Investing|

Compared to mutual funds or separately managed accounts, ANY benefit from redeeming in-kind is a bonus. That being said, not all ETFs and situations are created equal when it comes to tax efficiency, and the "golden rule" always applies - when given the option, the IRS wants to create scenarios where they receive tax dollars now instead of later. Here are some big-ticket items that cause inefficiencies (read as taxes…), many related to the “golden rule” above.

Trend-Following Filters – Part 5

By Henry Stern|February 15th, 2022|Research Insights, Trend Following, Trend-Following Course, Guest Posts|

There are two general types of Kalman filter models: steady-state and adaptive. A steady-state filter assumes that the statistics of the process under consideration are constant over time, resulting in fixed, time-invariant filter gains. The gains of an adaptive filter, on the other hand, are able to adjust to processes that have time-varying dynamics, such as financial time series which typically display volatility and non-stationarity.

Machine Learning: The Recovery of Missing Firm Characteristics

By Heiner Beckmeyer|February 10th, 2022|Research Insights, Guest Posts, Academic Research Insight, Machine Learning|

Firm characteristics are often missing, which forces both researchers and practitioners to come up with workarounds when handling missing data. Previous approaches resorted to either dropping observations with missing entries or simply imputing the cross-sectional mean of a given characteristic. As both procedures accompany serious drawbacks (see below), there is a need for more advanced methods. The authors set up an attention-based machine learning model, motivated by recent advances in natural language to find some answers

Trend-Following Filters – Part 4

By Henry Stern|January 11th, 2022|Research Insights, Trend Following, Guest Posts|

This article considers a different type of filter called the Kalman filter. The Kalman filter is a statistics-based algorithm used to perform the estimation of random processes. Our research will explain what Kalman Filters are and utilize them with financial time series data for trend following purposes.

Smarter in 10 Minutes with Matt Topley

By Matt Topley|December 3rd, 2021|Smarter in 10 Minutes, Guest Posts|

Time to get smarter in less than 10 minutes.

Welcome to our weekly series, "Smarter in 10 Minutes." This weekly series is aligned with our mission to empower investors through education and is curated by Matt Topley, a 25yr+ vet in the business who currently runs Lansing Street Advisors.

Matt wakes up "Jocko style" every morning and shoots out a daily newsletter (I'm a loyal reader!). The weekly "Smarter in 10 Minutes" is a lower frequency version of his daily newsletter.

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