Many investors are getting excited about the so-called “profitability factor,” originally posed by Novy-Marx (here is an alternative story) . Larry Swedroe has a high-level piece advocating the concept here. The basic idea is simple: Other things being equal, firms with high gross profits

215 Years of Global Multi-Asset Momentum: 1800-2014 (Equities, Sectors, Currencies, Bonds, Commodities and Stocks) (Geczy and Samonov) The Effect of Past Performance Framing on Investors’ Belief Updating (Gerhard, Hoffmann and Post) Mutual Fund Investors Seem to Be Chasing Overpriced Funds?

Facts and Fantasies About Commodity Futures Ten Years Later Gorton and Rouwenhorst (2006) examined commodity futures returns over the period July 1959 to December 2004 based on an equally-weighted index. They found that fully collateralized commodity futures had historically offered the same return

Forbes outlines one of Ben Graham’s basic value investment strategies and analyzes how it has performed from 1949 through 2012. Even with all of the fiscal cliff and European debt drama in 2012, the Graham-based portfolio has had a particularly good year. While the S&P 500 has notched a solid

Investors should know what they are buying and why they are buying it. Unfortunately, more often than not, investment products are jammed down the throats of unsuspecting victims who are either ignorant, easy to influence, and/or don’t really care. We highlighted an extreme example of this in the

Corporate Lobbying and Firm Performance Corporate lobbying activities are designed to influence legislators, regulators and courts, presumably to encourage favorable policies and/or outcomes. In dollar terms, corporate lobbying expenditures are typically one or even two orders of magnitude larger

How risky is it to buy an individual stock? This is a question investors should ask themselves when deciding to buy a single stock. However, many investors tend to get caught up in the story about why company XYZ is going to double over the next year. As an educated investor, it makes sense to know

How Should I Tactically Allocate my Assets? A lot of investors ask this question as their wealth grows and the number of financial products grows exponentially. In order to generate a response, investors pay money to professional finance geeks who often present complex formulas as a solution to the

Which Trend Is Your Friend? Managed-futures funds (sometimes called CTAs) trade predominantly on trends. There are several ways of identifying trends, either using heuristics or statistical measures often called "filters." Two important statistical measures of price trends are time series

A recent academic paper, Equal or Value Weighting? Implications for Asset-Pricing Tests, highlights two methods of weighting: Equal-weight and Value weight. As the paper states: With monthly rebalancing, an equal-weighted portfolio outperforms a value-weighted portfolio in terms of total mean

Post-discovery Performance: Will Anomalies Fade Away After Discovery? (Qu, Lu, Sun and Yan) The Search for Crisis Alpha: Weathering the Storm Using Relative Momentum (Newfound Research) Are Your Backtest Results fooling you? Try Monte Carlo Analysis (Better System trader) Buffett’s Alpha

Abstract: We distinguish between “good” and “bad” carry trades constructed from G-10 currencies. The good trades exhibit higher Sharpe ratios and slightly negative or even positive skewness, in contrast to the bad trades that have both substantially lower Sharpe ratios and skewness.

Jacobs, Regele and Weber A version of the paper can be found here. Want a summary of academic papers with alpha? Check out our Academic Research Recap Category. Abstract: Motivated by the time-series insights of Daniel and Moskowitz (2014), we investigate the link between expected skewness and

The Five-Factor Fama-French Model: International Evidence (Nusret Cakici) Doubt on Five-Factor Fama-French Model: Is it Just in Essence a Noise? (Hou, Xue and Zhang) Stocks with Negative Analyst Forecast Skewness tend to be undervalued? (Cai Zhu) Covering-Up When the Tide Goes Out? Momentum

Seeking Alpha? It’s a Bad Guideline for Portfolio Optimization Alpha is the most popular measure for evaluating the performance of both individual assets and funds. The alpha of an asset with respect to a given benchmark portfolio measures the change in the portfolio’s Sharpe ratio driven by a

A few weeks ago I wrote an article talking about ways to combine value investing and momentum investing. The high level takeaway from that article was to keep value and momentum as separate exposures. This conclusion was based on ranking firms on their combined value and momentum rankings, which can

In this article, we identify how we can improve the performance of the F-Score and enhance a generic value investing approach. In a 2000 study, "Value Investing: The Use of Historical Financial Statement Information to Separate Winners from Losers" (Journal of Accounting Research, 2000),

The Term Structure of Credit Spreads and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns We explore the link between credit and equity markets by considering the informational content of the term structure of credit spreads. A shallower credit term structure predicts decreases in default risk, increases in

We analyze the information content of corporate insiders’ trades after accounting for certain trading patterns. Insiders spread their trades over longer periods of time when they have a longer-lived informational advantage and when outside investors are less attentive. In contrast, they make

Deactivating Active Shares (Frazzini, Friedman and Pomorski) Is Being Different Better? Dispersion and Active Management (The Investor’s Field Guide) 9 Mistakes Quants Make that Cause Backtests to Lie (The Augmented Trader) Sell in May and Go Away: Still Good Advice for Investor? (Dichtl and

Cremers and Pareek A version of the paper can be found here. Want a summary of academic papers with alpha? Check out our Academic Research Recap Category. Abstract: This paper documents that among high Active Share portfolios - whose holdings differ substantially from the holdings of their benchmark

Gopal and Greenwood A version of the paper can be found here. Want a summary of academic papers with alpha? Check out our Academic Research Recap Category. Abstract: In this work, we investigate how mass shootings influence the stock price of firearms manufacturers. While significant anecdotal

Many consider smart beta to be a revolution in the asset management industry. For example, Bloomberg ran an article, “Funds Run by Robots Now Accounts for $400 Billion,” which caught our attention. According to this article, “Smart beta,” is one of the fastest growing segments of ETFs,

A rich body of literature has shown that value investing, or buying stocks that are “cheap” based on a variety of valuation metrics, is robust across different markets. For example, Fama and French (1998) highlighted the value premium across world equity markets. The authors find that value

Asset Allocation: Is it better to allocate portfolios to factors rather than to assets? (Cocoma, Czasonis, and etal) Tactical Asset Allocation with Market Valuations: Can’t even beat the simple 60/40 rule?? (Estrada) More on ‘Smart Beta” ETFs: How Smart are ‘Smart Beta’ ETFs? Analysis of

We are huge believers in value investing. I personally started off as a fundamental value guy, spending twenty-plus years trying to pick stocks. I eventually ran into Wes, who convinced me that a systematic approach to value investing was the way to go. Wes, as many of you are probably aware,

Quick Summary For a bond momentum strategy, it makes sense to select the top 3 or top 6 funds. The starting universe matters. One must consider the taxes and transaction costs associated with the strategy, which can be significant. Background Proponents of the momentum investing philosophy suggest

At this stage in our lives we’ve essentially memorized the CRSP/Compustat database. Name an anomaly and we can probably tell you the stats on it fairly quickly. Legitimate anomalies can usually be described via a behavioral finance lens: Can we identify poor psychology in the market? (Why do

The objective of this thesis is to develop and back-test an investment strategy created by professors Wesley R. Gray and Tobias E. Carlisle in their book Quantitative Value, published in 2013. Gray and Carlisle construct a quantitative strategy based on Warren Buffet’s investment philosophy and

We examine 2,190 SEC Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAERs) issued between 1982 and 2005. We obtain a comprehensive sample of firms that are alleged to have misstated their financial statements. We examine the characteristics of misstating firms along five dimensions: accrual quality,

Understanding Dual, Relative, and Absolute Momentum (Gary Antonacci) Long-short Strategy Simulation based on Front-Page Articles in the WSJ (Matthies and Liu) Am I My Peer’s Keeper? Social Responsibility in Financial Decision Making (Fulbrunn and Luhan) Employees Will Work Harder Under Loss

We came across an interesting article in the Wharton Magazine blog titled “The Dangerous Data Fetishes of Sports Analytics” by Ian Cooper. The main point of the article is that some sports statistics do not add value. The main example Ian cites is the “PDO” variable which is used in hockey.

Although it has been very difficult to overcome our initial skepticism, we've finally accepted the notion that simple technical analysis may serve as an effective way to manage risk and to time markets. As John Adams said many years ago, "Facts are stubborn things." However, our

Investing in strategies that exploit the low volatility anomaly have grown in popularity in recent years. While low volatility based strategies may or may not beat the return of a market cap weighted index, by construction, they will likely deliver significantly reduced volatility. This reduction in

This paper develops a theory that explains why financial crises follow profitable lending booms. When agents exhibit the "availability heuristic" and there is a long period of banking profitability, all agents — banks, their investors and regulators — end up in an “availability

This paper documents that the path of credit spreads since a firm's last loan influences the level at which it can currently borrow. If spreads have moved in the firm's favor (i.e., declined), it is charged a higher interest rate than justified by current fundamentals, and if spreads have

We investigate various methods to express a 10-Year Treasury Bond allocation. The primary issue with Treasury Bonds is their lack of tax-efficiency. T-bond income (and CPI adjustments in the case of TIPS) are taxed as ordinary income--ouch! A 2.5% yield is pretty bad, but a 1.25% after-tax yield

Recently Discovered Research You Might Have Missed: Back test a set of trading rules from 1870 to 2010 (Zakamulin) A comparison of investor sentiment indicators (The Behavioral Quant) The Nonlinear Price Dynamics of U.S. Equity ETFs (Caginalp, DeSantis and Sayrak)

A friend of the blog was inspired by our Robust Asset Allocation discussion, and conducted some backtests using our proposed risk management framework: 50% simple moving average rule (MA) 50% time series momentum rule (TSMOM) For naming convenience, we call our 50/50 approach ROBUST. Our friend

Over the past 10+ years I've cultivated a laundry list of websites associated with financial economics. My primary focus has been identifying sources for new ideas that are creative, unique, and have application in the real-world. Interestingly enough, none of the sources I've identified

Using a new daily dataset for all stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange, we study the impact of information asymmetry during the liquidity freeze and market run of October 1907 - one of the most severe financial crises of the 20th century. We estimate that the run on the market increased

There is sometimes confusion associated with so-called "momentum" strategies--we want to clear the muddy waters. We break momentum into two categories to differentiate between the different approaches to momentum: (1) Absolute, or time-series momentum: an asset classes' own past

Dong Lou splashed on the academic scene in 2009 and boy has he been busy! Prof Lou has some great papers out there that have inspired a lot of research and investing ideas at Alpha Architect. A few of our favorites: 'Consistent' Earnings Surprises We hypothesize that analysts with a

Book Overview One of the most fundamental choices for any investor is their approach to strategic asset allocation. What are the major asset classes to consider, and how much should be allocated to each asset class? For example, at a simplistic level, how much should one invest in stocks versus

We are probably most well known for our quantitative value investing strategies. The heart of our strategy is detailed in Wes' book, Quantitative Value (a reader's digest version is here). In the development of the Quantitative Value system there is no mention of the concept of

Crowdsourcing — when a task normally performed by employees is outsourced to a large network of people via an open call — is making inroads into the investment research industry. We shed light on this new phenomenon by examining the value of crowdsourced earnings forecasts. Our sample includes

Previous work shows that average returns on common stocks are related to firm characteristics like size, earnings/price, cash flow/price, book-to-market equity, past sales growth, long-term past return, and short-term past return. Because these patterns in average returns apparently are not

Beware of focusing an investment decision on "yield." In this piece we want to highlight that investing in high dividend yield stocks--without considering the valuation--is probably a BAD idea. We've noticed that many market participants point to the historical performance of high

We use a comprehensive dataset from a German discount brokerage firm to investigate both the prevalence and effects of moving average trading heuristics among individual investors. We document an abnormal increase of 30% in individuals’ trading volume on signal days. More than one in 10 investors

This paper singles out the key roles of US equity skewness and kurtosis in the hedge fund return generating process. We propose a conditional higher‐moment model with location, trading, and higher‐moment factors to describe the dynamics of the equity hedge, event‐driven, relative value, and