Alpha Architect

Trend Following Says Commodities…But Nothing Else!

By Wesley Gray, PhD|August 3rd, 2022|Research Insights, Trend Following, Introduction Course, Tactical Asset Allocation Research|

The analysis above highlights that we are in a rare regime when commodities are the only long asset with a positive trend. The last time this happened we entered a long period of high inflation and poor real returns. Will this happen again? Who knows. But we do know that post-1973 we entered a world where, for several decades (at least up to around 2007), both bonds and commodities were an important component of a diversified portfolio. The recent past has arguably made investors complacent in their reliance on a stock/bond portfolio as an end-all-be-all solution. When history tells us that incorporating commodities into a portfolio probably makes sense from a diversification standpoint.

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Combining Factors in Multifactor Portfolios

By Larry Swedroe|June 30th, 2022|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Larry Swedroe, Value Investing Research, Momentum Investing Research|

Reschenhofer’s findings demonstrate the important role that portfolio construction rules (such as creating efficient buy and hold ranges or imposing screens that exclude stocks with negative momentum) play in determining not only the risk and expected return of a portfolio but how efficiently the strategy can be implemented (considering the impact of turnover and trading costs)—wide (narrow) thresholds reduce (increase) portfolio turnover and transactions costs, thereby increasing after-cost returns and Sharpe ratios. His findings also provide support for multiple characteristics-based scorings to form long-only factor portfolios, encouraging the combination of slow-moving characteristics (such as value, investment and/or profitability) conditional on fast moving characteristics (such as momentum), to reduce portfolio turnover and transactions cost. Fund families such as AQR, Avantis, Bridgeway and Dimensional use such an approach, integrating multiple characteristics into their portfolios conditional on momentum signals.

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Does Emerging Markets Investing Make Sense?

By Wesley Gray, PhD|June 17th, 2022|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Key Research, Value Investing Research, Momentum Investing Research, Active and Passive Investing, Macroeconomics Research|

The analysis above suggests that portfolios that include or exclude emerging allocations are roughly the same. For some readers, this may be a surprise, but for many readers, this may not be "news." That said, even if the data don't strictly justify an Emerging allocation, the first principle of "stay diversified" might be enough to make an allocation.

Of course, the assumptions always matter.

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Strategies to Mitigate Tail Risk

By Larry Swedroe|May 26th, 2022|Crisis Alpha, Quality Investing, Larry Swedroe, Research Insights, Factor Investing, Trend Following, Academic Research Insight, Momentum Investing Research|

Investors care about more than just returns. They also care about risk. Thus, prudent investors include consideration of strategies that can provide at least some protection against adverse events that lead to left tail risk (portfolios crashing). The cost of that protection (the impact on expected returns) must play an important role in deciding whether to include them. For example, buying at-the-money puts, a strategy that eliminates downside risk, should have returns no better than the risk-free rate of return, making that a highly expensive strategy.

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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.

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Value Investing: Headwinds, Tailwinds, and Variables

By Ryan Kirlin|May 20th, 2022|Research Insights, Factor Investing, Value Investing Research, Tactical Asset Allocation Research|

Investing is no different. A question we regularly get in the current environment is "How does inflation affect value stocks?" Well...it depends. I could show you some data on how value stocks did in the 70's (period of high inflation) versus how they did in the 90's (low inflation). But if WW3 broke out tomorrow, wouldn't that variable quickly top all other variables? Probably. So let's table that variable.

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Using Momentum to Find Value

By Larry Swedroe|May 5th, 2022|Larry Swedroe, Factor Investing, Research Insights, Trend Following, Academic Research Insight, Value Investing Research, Momentum Investing Research|

Value and momentum are two of the most powerful explanatory factors in finance. Research on both has been published for about 30 years. However, it was not until recently that the two had been studied in combination and across markets. Bijon Pani and Frank Fabozzi contribute to the literature with their study “Finding Value Using Momentum,” published in The Journal of Portfolio Management Quantitative Special Issue 2022, in which they examined whether using six value metrics that have an established academic background combined with the trend in relative valuations provide better risk-adjusted returns than Fama-French’s traditional HML (high minus low book-to-market ratio) factor. The value metrics chosen were book value-to-market value; cash flow-to-price; earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA)-to-market value; earnings-to-price; profit margin-to-price; and sales-to-price. Using six different measures provides tests of robustness, minimizing the risk of data mining. However with so many dials to turn there is a risk of achieving positive returns that aren't material or achieving postive results with the potential for overfitting.

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Bond Investing in Inflationary Times

By Larry Swedroe|April 14th, 2022|Inflation Investing, Larry Swedroe, Research Insights, Academic Research Insight, Fixed Income|

As the chief research officer of Buckingham Strategic Partners, the issue I am being asked to address most often is about fixed income strategies when yields are at historically low levels and inflation risk is heightened due to the unprecedented increase in money creation (through quantitative easing), the extraordinary expansionary fiscal spending around the globe, and the war in Ukraine driving prices higher (especially for food and energy). As always, to answer the question we turn first to the academic evidence on which investments in general provide the best hedges against inflation.

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2022 Democratize Quant Conference Recap and Materials

By Wesley Gray, PhD|March 25th, 2022|Factor Investing, Research Insights, Conferences, Investor Education, Value Investing Research, Momentum Investing Research|

We recently hosted our Democratize Quant Conference (sign up here for updates).

This post is a recap of what we heard and some resources we can make available to the public.

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Can Investment Flows Affect Prices? Yep.

By Wesley Gray, PhD|March 25th, 2022|Dividends and Buybacks, Price Pressure Factor, Factor Investing, Research Insights, Academic Research Insight, Behavioral Finance, Tactical Asset Allocation Research|

Traditional finance theory suggests that stocks prices always reflect their fair market values based on publicly available information. Or in academic parlance, the "semi-strong" form efficient markets hypothesis serves as the null. What are the implications of this hypothesis? Well, the hypothesis suggests that the only reason a stock price will move is due to a shift in fundamentals (either through a change in expected cash flows or via the discount rate). But what about supply and demand shifts?

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