The Law of Regression to the Tail: How to Mitigate COVID-19, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophic Risks Bent Flyvbjerg (University of Oxford) 13 May 2020 Regression to the mean is nice and reliable, regression to the tail is reliably scary. We live in the age of regression to the tail. It is only

Longer is better for analyzing the stock market, which is why Professor Robert Shiller’s data set (with an 1871 starting date) is one of the great free resources on the internet for studying the history of US equities. With that in mind, let’s review how the current drawdown for the S&P 500

Howell E. Jackson (Harvard Law School) and Steven L. Schwarcz (Duke U.) April 19, 2020 The coronavirus has produced a public health debacle of the first-order. But the virus is also propagating the kind of exogenous shock that can precipitate – and to a considerable degree is already precipitating

In a previous post, I simulated S&P 500 drawdowns for perspective on what the current market correction may dispense in the weeks and months ahead. Let’s supplement that analysis by visually comparing the current and ongoing peak-to-market decline with the ten deepest drawdowns since 1950.

The widespread disruption from the coronavirus pandemic is obvious to everyone, but economic nowcasting and forecasting models are only just beginning to reflect the damage to what had been a moderately expanding US economy. Thanks to the lag in economic data, which can arrive with as long as two to

The US stock market tumbled again yesterday, falling to a 3-1/2-year low, thanks to expanding coronavirus threat. The economic outlook is grim, at least for the near term, and so the market is attempting to price in this stark change. The result, not surprisingly, is a sobering, rapid fall from

The coronavirus that’s roiling world markets and raising questions about the economic outlook has triggered a familiar shock to stocks: higher volatility. Is this a reason to change your asset allocation, rebalance the portfolio or modify risk management decisions? Maybe, but maybe not. There is

Well, that was painful. The increasingly hazy risk outlook linked to the coronavirus outbreak inspired a 3.35% haircut in the US stock market (S&P 500). The tumble was certainly a bracing counterpoint to the idea that sunny optimism is the only game in town. But before we let recency bias flip

A New Index of the Business Cycle William B. Kinlaw (State Street Global Markets), et al. January 2020 The authors introduce a new index of the business cycle that uses the Mahalanobis distance to measure the statistical similarity of current economic conditions to past episodes of recession and

Return correlations for the major asset classes have edged down in recent years, which implies that diversification opportunities have increased, if only marginally. The correlation readings are only modestly softer overall and for several asset class pairings it’s fair to say that nothing much

Macro News and Long-Run Volatility Expectations Anders Vilhelmsson (Lund University) December 10, 2019 I propose a new model-free method for estimating long-run changes in expected volatility using VIX futures contracts. The method is applied to measure the effect on stock market volatility of

Value Bubbles Messaoud Chibane and Samuel Ouzan (Neoma Business School) February 27, 2019 According to several extended behavioral theories, value profits should mirror momentum profits, and vary over time. We test these theories in the cross section of returns. Value returns depend on market

ETF Momentum Frank Weikai Li (Singapore Management University), et al. October 12, 2019 We document economically large momentum profits when sorting ETFs on returns over the past two to four years. A value-weighted, long-short strategy based on ETF momentum delivers Carhart (1997) four-factor alphas

The possibilities for quantifying risk in portfolio analytics seems to be limited only by the imagination of researchers. Indeed, you can find dictionaries that wade through an ever-lengthening list of indicators. But any short list of robust metrics surely deserves to include drawdown, which offers

Earlier this month I briefly reviewed a recent BlackRock report that highlighted that macroeconomic factors are typically driving investment strategy results. As a follow-up, let’s take a quick look at a basic real-world example of analyzing portfolios through a macroeconomic lens. First, let’s

Explaining the Demise of Value Investing Baruch Lev (NY University) and Anup Srivastava (U. of Calgary) August 25, 2019 The business press claims that the long-standing and highly popular value investing strategy—investing in low-valued stocks and selling short high-valued equities—lost its edge

Risk management has become a high priority for many investors over the past decade. The worst financial crisis and recession since the Great Depression in 2008-2009 clearly has the power to focus minds. Research shops have moved heaven and earth to search for solutions that attempt to limit risk

Yield Curve and Financial Uncertainty: Evidence Based on Us Data Efrem Castelnuovo (University of Melbourne) June 2019 How do short and long term interest rates respond to a jump in financial uncertainty? We address this question by conducting a local projections analysis with US monthly data,

In the grand scheme of investing, behavioral risk is second to none on the list of pitfalls that threaten to derail the best-laid plans for investing. The challenge is especially acute in the thankless task of trying to anticipate how you’ll react when a rough patch arrives. The mystery is all the

Diversification is famously described as the only free lunch in investing and so it’s no surprise that modeling, analyzing and otherwise dissecting the concept is a core part of portfolio design and management. The correlation coefficient is often the go-to metric in this corner of finance. But

Tail Risk Management for Multi-Asset Multi-Factor Strategies David Chambers (University of Cambridge), et al. January 8, 2019 Multi-asset multi-factor portfolio allocation is typically centred around a risk-based allocation paradigm, often striving for maintaining equal volatility risk budgets.

Factor Timing Revisited: Alternative Risk Premia Allocation Based on Nowcasting and Valuation Signals Olivier Blin (Unigestion), et al. 10 September 2018 Alternative risk premia are encountering growing interest from investors. The vast majority of the academic literature has been focusing on

In the spring of 2017, Yahoo pulled a fast one on the crowd by suddenly changing the technical coding rules for accessing its financial data, leaving countless R users high and dry, including yours truly. Numerous R files that had been meticulously written, revised and maintained over months and

It’s anyone’s guess if the recent rebound in US equities will soon push the S&P 500 Index to a new high. What we do know is that the market has staged a solid bounce so far. For the eight trading days since Christmas Eve’s close, when the S&P’s current drawdown hit bottom, the index

A bull market can be a fragile thing. To paraphrase Hemingway, there are two ways that investing profits can turn into losses: gradually, then suddenly. The latter profile applies to the latest adjustment in the S&P 500’s current drawdown. As recently as early October, the US stock market’s

Factor Investing: Get Your Exposures Right! François Soupé (BNP Paribas Asset Management), et al. October 26, 2018 This paper is devoted to the question of optimal portfolio construction for equity factor investing. The first part of the paper focusses on how to make sure that a given equity

Slicing and dicing the US equity market into factor buckets is, at its core, an effort to enhance return by engineering more control over risk management. A key part of this framework is recognizing that risk and return for the stock market overall is a byproduct of multiple factors, such as shares

Bloomberg last week published an intriguing story about a new exchange traded fund (ETF) that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to outperform market indexes and active managers alike. The implication: a new era of AI-driven investing has dawned, putting the standard applications of indexing at a

Hedging With Volatility Mario Alagoa (Sacred Heart University) May 9, 2018 A risk-averse investor with a long equity position is presumably interested in identifying a hedging strategy that protects the value of that investment. The common approach encompasses using either financial derivatives or

Interactive Brokers (IB) just published the second installment in a series I’m writing for the brokerage firm about using R for portfolio analysis: Modeling Tail Risk In R With Value at Risk. Today’s update (part deux) is more or less adapted from my recent book: Quantitative Investment

James Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Leuthold Group, sees trouble brewing in the growing disconnect between US equity sectors. He told CNBC earlier this week that correlations among US equities is unusually low and flashing a warning signal. That’s an especially dangerous sign when the

A couple of weeks back I published the first part of a full-chapter excerpt from my new book, Quantitative Investment Portfolio Analytics In R: An Introduction To R For Modeling Portfolio Risk and Return. Here’s the second half of this two-part excerpt of Chapter 5, which reviews the basics for

When Does Cap-Weighting Outperform? Factor-Based Explanations Roger G Clarke (Ensign Peak Advisors), et al. May 1, 2018 Equity mutual fund performance can be partially explained by commonly-followed equity market factors, and the proposition that fund managers in the aggregate have more

Here’s an excerpt from my new book, Quantitative Investment Portfolio Analytics In R: An Introduction To R For Modeling Portfolio Risk and Return, which was published last week. In this two-part excerpt of Chapter 5, we’ll look at a basic procedure for downloading factor premia from Professor

Quantitative Investment Portfolio Analytics In R: An Introduction To R For Modeling Portfolio Risk and Return rolled off the presses earlier today for the first time. The book is currently available as a softback title. Stay tuned for details on an upcoming Kindle version. Meantime, after nearly

Later this month I’ll be publishing my third book: Quantitative Investment Portfolio Analytics In R: An Introduction To R For Modeling Portfolio Risk and Return. Although there are already many R books on the market, this one serves a particular niche: a short guide for recovering Excel addicts

Is Fertility a Leading Economic Indicator? Kasey Buckles (University of Notre Dame), at al. March 28, 2018 Many papers show that aggregate fertility is pro-cyclical over the business cycle. In this paper we do something else: using data on more than 100 million births and focusing on within-year

The Equity Risk Premium in 2018 John R. Graham and Campbell R. Harvey (Duke University) March 27, 2018 We analyze the history of the equity risk premium from surveys of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) conducted every quarter from June 2000 to December 2017. The risk premium is the expected

Investing strategies run the gamut, but every portfolio shares a common goal: delivering optimal results. The catch is that there’s a wide range of possibilities for defining optimal and so your mileage may vary, depending on preferences, assets, and other factors. Eran Raviv offers a useful

Factor Momentum Robert D. Arnott (Research Affiliates), et al. January 31, 2018 Past industry returns predict the cross section of industry returns, and this predictability is at its strongest at the one-month horizon (Moskowitz and Grinblatt 1999). We show that the cross section of factor returns

The case for holding a portfolio that’s diversified across markets and asset classes is built on the assumption that return correlations will remain below 1.0 (perfect positive correlation) by more than a trivial degree. To the extent that you own assets that move independently of one another

Does history offer a reason to be cautious on the outlook for stocks if inflation and interest rates are rising? Yes, sort of, according to a New York Times article published on Thursday. Hedging just a bit, the Times piece relates that “it’s long been a truism that higher inflation and its

The recent plunge in the US stock market ended the extended run of tranquility in equity returns. The media’s metric of choice to cite this change is the CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX, which surged earlier this week to the highest level in nearly three years, based on daily data. The upward

The 4.1% plunge in the S&P 500 yesterday looks ominous, all the more so since it follows last week’s hefty 3.8% decline. But focusing on what just happened distorts our capacity to maintain a healthy sense of historical perspective. As an antidote, let’s step back and consider the latest

How bad was last week’s rout in US equities? The slide is the biggest weekly drop for the S&P 500 Index in over two years. But that’s not saying much, given how calm the upside bias for the equity trend has been lately. Perhaps the bigger surprise is that we’ve gone so long without a

Momentum-based investing strategies may be one of the most reliable drivers of alpha, but like all sources of excess return this factor premium waxes and wanes through time. Accordingly, deciding when to exit the trade (or reduce exposure to it) is no less critical than determining when to jump on

Fama-French Factors and Business Cycles Arnav Sheth and Tee Lim (Saint Mary’s College of California) December 4, 2017 We examine the behavior of Fama-French factors across business cycles measured in various ways. We first split up the business cycles into four stages and examine the cumulative

So many research papers, so little time. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? You might start with the following five economic and financial papers that appeared in The Capital Spectator’s Research Review column in 2017. In a sea of newly minted studies over the past 12 months, these

The US stock market has been on a tear lately. Has the party gone too far? A rising chorus of analysts say that caution is advised, citing several valuation metrics. The Shiller PE Ratio, for instance, is currently at its second-highest level since the late-1800s. Valuations appear stretched, but

Implementing Momentum: What Have We Learned? Adrienne Ross (AQR Capital Management), et al. December 2017 An abundance of academic evidence and theory exists on the efficacy and intuition behind momentum investing, yet a limited number of studies discuss the feasibility of running momentum