Eric Balchunas had a recent tweet that I found fascinating. Eric’s tweet merely captures the tip of the iceberg with respect to the current market environment, which certainly feels “bubbly.” 1 The gist of the tweet is that $META, which is an ETF from our friends over at Roundhill Investments,

Did you know that the percentage of foreign sales of the FTSE 100 is 76% and 43% for the SP500? This study investigates the power of indirect international exposure, that is international exposure through holdings of domestic stocks. The authors ask the following: What is the indirect international

Though classical option pricing models assume that options are redundant assets, more recent research rejects this idea. However, research on cross-sectional predictors of option returns is relatively scarce and not very well understood. Contrarily, extensive literature examines cross-sectional

What is the role of factors in asset allocation? Should investors substitute factor exposures for asset classes in constructing strategic portfolios? Or should factors be used as an instrument to enhance the performance of asset class-based allocation schemes? There are still quite a few questions

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 Markets 1926-2019,” published in the April 2021 issue of The Journal of Investing. The study updated his 2018 paper, “Do

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 governance (G) characteristics. A full list of our posts on ESG can be found here. The demand from investors who have a

Okay, we can’t keep it a secret, we are fans of value investing 1 So when Cliff Asness and his team at AQR write about value, we get excited. The analysis reported in this research confirms the relationship between static value strategies and future returns while incorporating the notion that the

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 securities and the liquidity of ETFs. Sometimes we hear that ETFs have excess liquidity to the underlying and at others, ETFs

Previously, we have written about the Momentum of News, which highlights that lots of positive news can lead to future positive returns (without a look-ahead bias!). Today’s post builds on the concept that news (and sentiment?) are predictive for returns — which sounds intuitive. The writers of

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 Expired?,” have investigated the impact on U.S. value strategies of the increase in the relative importance of

The authors of this paper identify aggregate supply and aggregate demand shocks for the US economy utilizing macroeconomic data on inflation, real GDP growth, core inflation, and the unemployment gap. They then go on to extract how these shocks to supply and demand impact the term structure of

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 there is a replication crisis because the majority of studies cannot be replicated and/or their findings are the result of multiple

ESG products have been flooding the market and it is difficult for investors to assess the ground truth. To make matters worse, with limited sample size periods and datasets, trying to determine “evidence-based” ESG insights, is challenging. Nonetheless, we’ve been covering the academic

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 Momentum and the Momentum Factor,” has demonstrated that momentum exists across financial markets (stocks,

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

Portfolio diversification benefits are often driven by correlation coefficients, but this analysis can get complicated, fast. Over time academics and practitioners have realized that it is not enough to simply calculate a correlation using short return intervals (daily?, monthly?) over a sample

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 the December 2017 study “Fama-French Factors and Business Cycles,” examined the behavior of six Fama-French factors—market beta (MKT),

Elton, Gruber, and Busse (2004) as well as Hortacsu and Syverson (2004) suggest that mutual fund markets are not perfectly competitive and that fees do matter to investors. In contrast, the neoclassical view of mutual funds (see for example Berk and Green, 2004; Pastor, Stambaugh and Taylor, 2019

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 alpha. There are now so many that economist John Cochrane, in his 2011 presidential address to the American Finance

Remember HML? It was the original formulation for estimating the “value” premium published by Fama & French in 1992. In that seminal article, FF argued based on the results they obtained, that the risk of owning equity is multidimensional. One of those dimensions of risk they used was

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 been receiving more attention due to its increasing importance in economic values. According to a December 29, 2020, Forbes article,

This paper contributes to the literature on understanding the limits of arbitrage and the resulting dynamics of price discovery. Specifically, it studies the context of "merger arbitrage," which is a well-known investment strategy and unless there are limits to arbitrage, this market

This paper studies the relationship between aggregate investor attention and subsequent market returns over the following week. The authors create two different investor attention indicators—one for aggregate retail attention (ARA) and one for aggregate institutional attention (AIA). ARA is found

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 Expired?,” have investigated the impact on U.S. value strategies of the increase in the relative importance of

While there may be debates about passive and active investing, and even blogs about the numbers of active funds that were outperformed by the market, history taught us that the outperformance of active or passive investing is cyclical. As a proxy for active investing, the paper examines factor

nternational markets have been a fertile testbed for factor research because they offer an opportunity to test old ideas on new data. Much of the previous work studying factor structure and risk premia in international markets uses highly aggregated test assets, such as country portfolios, industry

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 gambling, tobacco, alcohol, guns, and defense industries) will become depressed if a large enough proportion

March for the Fallen (#MFTF) will happen on September 25, 2021. COVID can't kill the event this year! Action Item: Please let us know your trip details so we can support you as much as possible. Here are the links to prior updates if you'd like to review: Footwear and foot care

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 the ability of common factors to explain the variation of returns of bond funds, results which have important implications

Despite government bonds being one of the major asset classes invested in global portfolios, 30% of overall market capitalization according to Doeswijk, et al. (2020), little work has been done to investigate whether factors are present in the sovereign bond market. (Here is a deep dive into fixed

Prospect theory was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. The theory starts with the concept of loss aversion—the observation that people react differently between potential losses and potential gains. Thus, people make decisions based on the potential gain or loss relative to

In a 2020 paper, the authors explore the side effects of applying ESG screens to a passive portfolio. While the ESG scores or tilt was improved and Sharpe ratios increased, significant regional, sector, and conventional risk factor exposures were magnified. While investors may be attracted and

Two of the more interesting puzzles in finance are the high beta anomaly (high beta stocks have lower returns) and the IVOL anomaly (stocks with greater idiosyncratic volatility have produced lower returns). These are anomalies because both beta and IVOL are viewed as risk factors and should be

The research (and the theory) has convincingly shown that mutual funds should and do underperform a passive index by an amount approximately equal to fees. However, no one has actually tried to construct the active mutual fund dominating passive strategy using commercially available products. It

As the following table demonstrates, since its inception in the 1970s, the private equity industry has grown significantly. According to Preqin data, there are now more than 18,000 private equity funds, with assets under management exceeding $4 trillion. Source: NACUBO endowment studies, FY

Last week Tommi looked into whether hedge funds could time factors. The conclusion? Probably. This week we're going to see if Mutual Fund managers have any skill at cracking the factor timing code. The conclusion? They aren't great factor timers! The authors of the paper study a large

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 returns are negatively correlated. This relationship results in the tendency to produce negative equity returns in times of high

This study pulls together several threads in the academic literature: (1) the persistence of hedge fund outperformance; (2) the apparent use of time-varying beta exposures by hedge funds, where betas are predicated on conditions such as leverage, carry trade, major events and conditions in the

My October 29, 2020, article for Alpha Architect examined the research on the profitability factor. I then reviewed the findings of the June 2020 study “On the Conjoint Nature of Value and Profitability,” which analyzed how combining the profitability factor with the value factor— tilting the

Book to Market (B/M) has been a prominent indicator used to construct "value" tilted portfolios. The love affair with B/M started with Graham and Dodd (1934), but became the gold standard after Fama and French (1992). Historically, B/M was a reasonable ratio to express the value factor and

This time is different. --John Templeton "This time is different," is a sentiment that leads many investors to stray from using data analysis in their investment decision process and more towards discretionary judgment. The logic as to why data analysis techniques may not apply to

In 2015, 197 nations signed onto the Paris Agreement and committed to limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels. Although the arguments are compelling, the drive to manage carbon risk presents quite a challenge for individual investors and portfolio managers.

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. 1 In 1997, Mark Carhart, in his study “On Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance,” was the first to use a momentum

When it comes to Value and Momentum investing we often get asked the following set of questions: Should I use value and momentum, in one screen, to form a single portfolio of stocks? ("Blended", "combined", or "integrated") Or should I focus on the value and momentum

The value spread is the difference between the value signal in the long versus the short portfolio. This isn’t the first time we have hit on this topic. Wes and I have done several posts on the subject: Timing Value and Momentum with Valuation-Spreads The Returns to Value Strategies When Valuation

I examine the performance records of performance of Ben Graham's well-known disciples: Walter Schloss, Tom Knapp, Warren Buffett, Bill Ruane, Charlie Munger, Rick Guerin, and Stan Perlmeter. The research question I seek to address is the following: Do the academic "value" and

The relationship among ESG ratings from third-party providers has historically produced conflicting results. Differences in sourced information and weighting schemes have produced low correlations between ratings and as a result, have handicapped the efforts to understand the relationship between

In Part 1, we defined fixed income factors. But factors alone will not solve each investor’s problem. Below, we extend the discussion by walking through a case study that shows how an asset allocator might use factors to solve a common problem: how to invest in a low yield environment given the

A few weeks ago I saw comments on Twitter regarding the Russell 3,000 Value and Growth indices having approximately the same returns since inception. For example, here is Ben Johnson from Morningstar 1 As viewed from this tweet, and is born out in the data for the Russell indices, it appears that

This is the first part of a series of guest posts by Kai Wu, the CIO & Founder of Sparkline Capital. The Factor Zoo As readers of Alpha Architect’s blog, you’re certainly familiar with factor investing. Factors are quantifiable firm characteristics that explain cross-sectional stock returns.