The financial equivalent of the famous Miller Lite, “tastes great, less filling” debate is the debate between traditional financial economics which uses risk theories to explain asset pricing and the newer behavioral finance field that [...]
In 1921, University of Chicago Professor Frank Knight wrote the classic book “Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit.” An article from the Library of Economics and Liberty described Knight’s definitions of risk and uncertainty as follows: Risk [...]
Since the development of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) in the 1960s, hundreds of anomalies (what John Cochrane famously called a “zoo of new factors”) have been uncovered in the cross-section of stock returns. [...]
As the chief research officer for Buckingham Strategic Wealth and The BAM Alliance, I’m often asked, after any asset class or factor experiences a period of poor performance, if the historical outperformance of stocks with [...]
In a recent ETF column, Allan Roth listed five investment lessons. While I agreed with much of what he wrote, one claim—factor investing has “failed miserably”— called for examination of the facts. But first, a [...]
A good friend, Sherman Doll, related the following story. Sherman has been a two-line sport kite flier for years. While not a pro, he has learned a few tricks from observing the flying behavior of [...]
Each time S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes its latest Active Versus Passive Scorecard, the persistent failure of the vast majority of actively managed funds to outperform is highlighted. The evidence on this failure led Charles [...]
The CAPM was the first formal asset-pricing model. Market beta was its sole factor. With the 1992 publication of their paper, “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns,” Eugene Fama and Kenneth French introduced a new-and-improved [...]
The 2014 study by Andrea Frazzini and Lasse Heje Pedersen, “Betting Against Beta,” found strong support for low-beta strategies. I’ve previously written on low-beta strategies here. This paper finds that, for U.S. stocks, the betting [...]
The carry factor is the tendency for higher-yielding assets to provide higher returns than lower-yielding assets — it is a cousin to the value factor, which is the tendency for relatively cheap assets to outperform [...]
It has been well-documented that value stocks have provided higher expected returns than growth stocks. However, there is a great debate about the source of that premium: Is it risk-based or is it related to [...]
Conventional wisdom can be defined as ideas that are so accepted that they go unquestioned. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom is often wrong. Two great examples are that millions of people once believed the conventional wisdom that [...]
The academic research has generally found valuations, such as the earnings yield (E/P) (or the CAPE 10 earnings yield) and valuation spreads, have predictive value in terms of future returns. The higher the earnings yield, [...]
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 quantitative easing (reducing the amount of bonds in their portfolio, [...]
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 to buying winners and selling losers in the U.S. equity [...]
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.
As my co-author Andrew Berkin, the director of research for Bridgeway Capital Management, and I explain in our new book, “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing,” there is considerable evidence of cross-sectional return predictability. Citing [...]
The Holy Grail for mutual fund investors is the ability to identify in advance, which of the active mutual funds (or ETFs nowadays) will outperform in the future. The evidence suggests this task is almost [...]
One of the great debates in finance is whether the source of the value premium is risk-based or a behavioral anomaly. In our book, “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing,” my co-author Andrew Berkin and [...]
Momentum is the tendency for assets that have performed well (poorly) in the recent past to continue to perform well (poorly) in the future, at least for a short period of time. The momentum effect [...]
