What Do Mutual Fund Investors Really Care About?
Are individuals just naïve performance chasers, unaware of the financial literature, or are they sophisticated investors? Pretty much.
Understanding Momentum Investing
The main takeaway for investors is that Kelly, Moskowitz, and Pruitt demonstrated that past return characteristics are strongly predictive of a stock’s realized exposures to common risk factors, providing direct evidence that price trend strategies are in part explainable as compensation for common factor exposures—past returns predict betas on factors and those factors have high average returns.
The Relationship Between the Value Premium and Interest Rates
We've been suffering through the deepest and longest drawdown in values history. Looking for a scapegoat to explain the lackluster performance many have pointed to low interest rates as the root cause of the underperformance. The question is have interest rates impacted value in the past?
Does the Market Efficiently Price the Value of Brands?
Despite the fact that a company’s internally generated intangible investments create future value, under current U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, internally developed intangibles are not included in reported assets. While research and development is an important intangible asset, so too is branding. Omission of an increasingly important class of assets reduces the usefulness and relevance of financial statement analysis that uses book value.
Size, Value, Profitability, and Investment Factors in International Stocks
Using data on 65,000 stocks from 23 countries, they evaluated the performance of the Fama-French factors, examining the factor premia in global markets to verify their robustness across different company size categories and geographical regions. Their data sample covered the period 1987-2019.
Chasing Low Beta Loses Alpha
One of the big problems for the first formal asset pricing model developed by financial economists, the CAPM, was that it predicts a positive relationship between risk and return. However, empirical studies have found the actual relationship to be basically flat, or even negative. Over the last 50 years, the most “defensive” (low-volatility or low-beta, low-risk) stocks have delivered both higher returns and higher risk-adjusted returns than the most “aggressive” (high-volatility, high-risk) stocks.
The Vanishing Illiquidity Premium
Liquidity—the ability to buy and sell significant quantities of a given asset quickly, at low cost, and without a major price concession—is valuable to investors. [...]
A History of Wealth Creation in the U.S. Equity Markets
Hendrik Bessembinder contributes to the literature on the returns to public equity investment diversification benefits with his study “Wealth Creation in the US Public Stock [...]
The Impact of ESG Scores on Asset Prices
Sustainable investing has grown substantially in recent years, demonstrating that investor demand can be driven by nonfinancial issues such as environmental (E), social (S), and [...]
ETF Liquidity Risks? A Discussion
Because of the complexity inherent to ETF trading in the secondary market, there are frequent misunderstandings about the relationship between the liquidity of the underlying [...]
Value Investing and Intangibles
Recent research, including the 2020 studies “Explaining the Recent Failure of Value Investing” and “Intangible Capital and the Value Factor: Has Your Value Definition Just [...]
Crowding and Factor Premiums
My March 23, 2021, article for Alpha Architect addressed the issue that in recent years the field of empirical finance has faced challenges from papers arguing that [...]
Is Currency Momentum Factor Momentum?
A large body of evidence, including the studies “Is There Momentum in Factor Premia? Evidence from International Equity Markets,” Factor Momentum Everywhere (Summary)” and “Factor [...]
Is The Value Premium Smaller Than We Thought?
From 2017 through March 2020, the relative performance of value stocks in the U.S. was so poor, experiencing its largest drawdown in history, that many [...]
Factor Timing Is Tempting
Academic research has found that factor premiums are both time-varying and dependent on the economic cycle. For example, Arnav Sheth, and Tee Lim, authors of [...]
International Tests of Factor Anomalies: Most Don’t Survive
Since the development of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) about 50 years ago, academic researchers have documented hundreds of “anomalies” that generate significant positive [...]
The Impact of Goodwill on Stock Returns
A firm’s stock price should reflect the value of both its tangible and intangible capital. While tangible capital has been widely studied, intangible capital has [...]
Value Investing and the Role of Intangibles
Recent research, including the 2020 studies “Explaining the Recent Failure of Value Investing” and “Intangible Capital and the Value Factor: Has Your Value Definition Just [...]
The Benefits of Sin Stocks
While environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing continues to gain in popularity, economic theory suggests the share prices of “sin” businesses (typically those involved in [...]
The Role of Book-to-Market in Bond Returns
My August 17, 2020, article for Advisor Perspectives, “Factor-Based Investing Beats Active Management for Bonds,” provided the evidence from a series of academic papers on [...]