Empirical research, including the 2017 paper “A Century of Evidence on Trend-Following Investing,” has found momentum to be a persistent and pervasive factor in returns of not only stocks but other asset classes as well, including bonds, commodities, and currencies. Recent empirical research on

With a capitalization of $1.3 trillion, cryptocurrencies are now (2022) roughly 50% of the value of US dollars and coins. What was once a fad, has now become prominent and increasingly diverse from an investor’s point of view. In response, this article discusses five key features and concepts

Recent research shows that B/M is losing explanatory power (Asness et al. 2015, Fama-French 2015, Hou et al. 2015). Some have theorized that the decrease in effectiveness in B/M is due to the increasingly large value of intangible assets. Forty years ago the market was dominated by Kodak, General

Christoph Reschenhofer contributes to the factor-based investment literature with his April 2022 paper, “Combining Factors,” in which he investigated the performance of multifactor portfolios formed via a combination of stock characteristics scores. He began by noting that while “the finance

A lot of people ask me how I invest my own money, and I am always happy to oblige. But I have never discussed the topic in the public (unlike my friend Meb, who has a great post dedicated to the subject). However, this past week Justin and Jack asked if they could grill me on my personal portfolio

Ron Kaniel, Zihan Lin, Markus Pelger, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh contribute to the asset pricing literature with their January 2022 study “Machine-Learning the Skill of Mutual Fund Managers” in which they used machine learning in the form of an artificial neural network to examine the universe

Can the returns from running factor strategies be enhanced if institutional investors selectively and actively participate? Most of the evidence presented in this paper would suggest the answer is an unqualified YES. The authors argue this would require institutional investors to possess and then

This post focuses on the costs and benefits of including generic broad-based emerging market exposures in one’s portfolio (Note, we do not discuss factors/freedom/etc.). The analysis is not meant to be exhaustive and/or highly complex. Nor is it meant to sway the reader in one direction or the

By the middle of 2019, we had been running an ensemble of relative sentiment(1) indicators in live asset management for several years. One of the components of that ensemble was a strategy that looked at Sentix sentiment indices. For those unfamiliar with Sentix (a German company), every week it

Cryptocurrency investing is a widely debated topic and one can find plenty of debates on Twitter discussing the fed, fiat currencies, and inflation. Regardless of where you fall on the crypto spectrum, we try and focus on research-centric takes on various investment themes whenever possible. The

Since the 1992 publication of “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns” by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French factor-based strategies and products have become an integral part of the global asset management landscape. While “top-down” allocation to factor premiums (such as size, value,

Market commentators sometimes suggest that the equity ETF market is just a bunch of “index funds” that all do essentially the same thing: deliver undifferentiated stock market exposure. How true is that statement? Fortunately, we can test the hypothesis that the ETF market is roughly a few

Traditional asset pricing theory holds that the workings of information networks among investors are good descriptors of equity markets. Investors that are “better informed” about fundamentals and who trade earlier than less well informed investors will receive higher returns. As the” better

Momentum, the tendency of past winner stocks to outperform past loser stocks over the next several months, is one of the most well-documented and well-researched asset pricing anomalies. In the asset pricing literature, momentum is generally defined over the short-, medium- and long-term in the

Not long ago, 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

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

n my past life as a rower, I spent a lot of time figuring out which way the wind was blowing: Would it be a headwind and slow things down? Or would it be a tailwind and shorten the race? But a tailwind that went against the current could cause choppy water…which would slow things back down.

Momentum, the tendency of past winner stocks to outperform past loser stocks over the next several months, is one of the most well-documented and well-researched asset pricing anomalies. In our book “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing,” Andrew Berkin and I presented the evidence of a

Plenty of research ( most recently, Cziraki et al. 2021) shows that insider buys contain value-relevant information while insider sales include little to no information. But what about the action of “not trading”? The authors of this study ask the following: Are the trades of portfolio insiders

Short answer up front–very little.(1) This was a simple question posed to me by one of our blog readers–what impact does excluding stocks trading at 10x P/S have on a Momentum portfolio? A good question–especially for those who are “value” investors that are interested in momentum. For

Outperforming the market, before expenses, is a zero-sum game—if one group of active investors outperforms, another group of active investors must underperform. Is there a group of sophisticated investors who persistently exploit more naïve investors? The body of research has found that before

Value and momentum are two of the most powerful explanatory factors in finance. Research on both has been published for over 30 years(1). 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

In this article, the authors expound on the importance of the factor “revolution” in finance. Factor investing has moved from a bedrock position to a future of innovation and disruption. With respect to factors the authors discuss where we have been and what can we look forward to. What are the

The 2014 study by Andrea Frazzini and Lasse Pedersen, “Betting Against Beta,” established strong support for low-beta (as well as low-volatility) strategies. The authors found that for U.S. stocks, the betting against beta (BAB) factor (a portfolio that holds low-beta assets leveraged to a beta

A common mistake made by many passive investors is that they view all index funds in the same asset class as “commodities(1)”, often considering only the expense ratio when making their investment choices. However, not all index funds are alike, and not all passively managed funds (what I refer

In this research, the authors explore the role of financial intermediaries in contagion or comovements in pricing efficiency. Specifically, lead market makers (LMMs) like Goldman Sachs, Cantor Fitzgerald, RBC Capital Markets, and others, have funding constraints that may influence their ability to

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

The growth of ETFs has been explosive (and we aren’t helping the matter via ETF Architect which facilitates low-cost high quality ETF white label services). At the end of 2020, there was roughly $5.4 trillion invested in ETFs in the United States, representing more than 25% of US market trading by

Firm characteristics such as size, book-to-market ratio, profitability, and momentum have been found to be correlated with expected returns. The predictive power of these characteristics may stem from their industry component, their firm-specific component, or both. For example, while the study

How investors understand and use central bank communications, aka FEDSPEAK, is oftentimes cryptic and difficult to analyze. This study attempts to provide some clarity to this issue by applying textual analysis to both high-frequency price and communication data, to focus on episodes whereby stock

We can define an investment bubble as an irrational strong price increase—implying a predictable strong decline. The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) implies both the absence of bubbles and that the future return is unpredictable. In his Nobel Prize lecture, the father of the EMH, Eugene Fama

One of the most established tenets in social psychology science states, “When considering what content to share in their social interactions, people primarily contemplate what impressions their sharing could create among receivers and whether those impressions are consistent with who they are or

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. Democratize Quant 2022 Agenda/Outline Session 1: State of the Asset Management Industry (with a focus on the ETF aspect) Dave

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

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. In addition,

Who among us wouldn’t want to be the savior that predicts a market crisis and saves our clients from losses in capital — or even better — profits from them? A central topic of interest for academics is whether there are more precise tools to predict financial crises. Those who believe so

Academic research has found that factor premiums are both time-varying and dependent on the economic cycle. For example, the authors of the 2017 study “Fama-French Factors and Business Cycles” examined the behavior of six Fama-French factors—market beta (MKT), size (SMB), value (HML), momentum

How well do quantitative investors navigate around the changes to the accounting standards that are endemic to the financial data used in quantitative strategies? The numbers reported on financial statements are wholly governed by regulation and by each firm’s interpretation of those accounting

As mind-bending as it sounds, although a company’s internally generated intangible investments generate future value, they are currently not accepted as assets under US GAAP. Omission of this increasingly important class of assets reduces the usefulness and relevance of financial statement

Diversification has been around since the early 1950s and is often considered a “free lunch” in finance. But is that actually the case? We’ve highlighted here and here that the reality is more complicated than the theory. Consider the two basic assumptions about correlations in the context of

From 1991 to 2018, capital expenditures as a percentage of total sales remained relatively flat, at about 10 percent. On the other hand, personnel expenses almost doubled during that time. In fact, by 2018 personnel expenses (the costs for hiring, wages, salaries, and bonuses; social security and

Previous articles in this series examine, from a digital signal processing (DSP) frequency domain perspective, various types of digital filters used by quantitative analysts and market technicians to analyze and transform financial time series for trend-following purposes. An Introduction to Digital

The question of whether or not the FED considers or responds to the stock market in its policy decisions has been studied fairly extensively, however, the subject of the existence of the “FED put” continues to pop up in the literature. In this particular revival of the issue, the authors are

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 investors jumped to the conclusion that the value premium was dead. It is certainly possible that what economists call a “regime change” could

A lot of ink has been spilled on a seemingly simple question: Why does the momentum factor exist? We have done our fair share contributing to the question and our collective conclusions are in our book Quantitative Momentum. We walked away from the question and determined the following: We will

The most basic tenet of financial theory is that risk and expected return are related. One widely used measure of risk is volatility. As far back as 1976, with the publication of Fischer Black’s “Studies of Stock Price Volatility Changes,” financial economists have known that volatility and

Inflation — what’s that? … It has been quite a while since inflation has been considered a problem. Today, however, the angst surrounding the possibility of a resurgence in inflation is real and “top of mind” for investors. If the current fear becomes a reality, how should investors react?

In our 2016 book “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investor” Andrew Berkin and I recommended that due to the risks of data mining (or p-hacking)—researchers torture the data until it confesses—for you to consider investing in a factor it should have demonstrated a premium that was:

Previous articles in this series examine, from a digital signal processing (DSP) frequency domain perspective, various types of digital filters used by quantitative analysts and market technicians to analyze and transform financial time series for trend-following purposes. An Introduction to Digital

Allocations to illiquid assets(1) have become increasingly popular, thus requiring asset managers to consider portfolio-wide liquidity characteristics. Although determining the price of illiquidity is a challenge for investors, the construction of a portfolio that includes liquidity constraints can