This is a test of two tactical asset allocation strategies from Brian Livingston’s new book Muscular Portfolios and his site MuscularPortfolios.com: the “Mama Bear” and “Papa Bear” Portfolios. The short and sweet take: neither of these strategies tread new ground – they’re both based

As I write this around 11am EST both NFLX and CELG are threatening to close up > 50% from their December 24th closing price, just 14 trading days ago. While that sometimes happens with speculative smallcap stocks, it is very unusual to see a largecap S&P 100 stock accomplish such strong gains

Factor investing is a broadly used approach in asset management, specially for the equity market, but, can we apply this idea in order to explain currency returns? The idea at the core of factor investing is that there are different sources of risk in the market and that the exposure of the

We’ve posted our quarterly attribution materials on our performance site.(1) We enjoyed putting the materials together and think they will be informative for those who follow our Indexes. The materials and videos are part of our long-term plan is to continually improve our quarterly communications

Trading and investing doesn’t have to be complicated. Check out this chart: source: Dimson, Marsh and Staunton, Triumph of the Optimists The blue line shows returns from US Stocks from 1900 to today. That’s a 48,000x increase in nominal value. The yellow line shows returns from US Bonds from

Many quantitative trading strategies thrive in high volatility regimes, while other trading strategies work best in low volatility regimes. So which global markets are the most and least volatile? This post compares the daily, overnight, and intraday volatility of 17 countries. Methodology Using

The purpose of this study was to examine the changes in the distribution of the US equity risk premium as the return horizon varies from monthly, annually, 3 year, 5 year, 10 year, 20 and 30 year periods. The equity premium was calculated as the monthly difference between the Market and Treasury

Recent market volatility has caused many tactical models to make sudden and significant changes in their allocation profiles. Periods such as Q4 2018 highlight model specification risk: the sensitivity of a strategy’s performance to specific implementation decisions. We explore this idea with a

ESG factors generated positive excess returns since 2009 Show positive exposure to Low Volatility & Quality and negative exposure to Value & Size Factor exposure is likely structural and not temporary INTRODUCTION BlackRock is aggressively launching products with high environmental, social,

2019 is well underway. 2018 was personally difficult, so I am happy it’s behind us. Without further ado, here is what my analytics report shows to be the three most popular posts for 2018: – Create own Recession Indicator using Mixture Models (3:53 minutes average time on page) – Portfolio

Quandl, the leading platform for financial and alternative data, will host its third annual Quandl Data Conference (formerly the Alternative Data Conference) on February 28, 2019, at Convene’s 46th St. location in New York City. “We launched this event nearly three years ago to create awareness

Opex week overall has typically been a bullish part of the month for the market. But over the last 20 years, January has been a major exception to this rule. The table below shows results of buying the Friday before options expiration week in January and then selling at the close of option

Liquidity yields are convenience yields of financial securities that typically arise from high liquidity, suitability as collateral or preferred regulatory status. New research argues that relative changes in liquidity yields on government bonds across countries have a significant impact on exchange

A “pump-and-dump” scheme promoter: (1) builds a position in a stock (often a thinly traded penny stock); (2) gooses its price by spreading misleading information; and, (3) liquidates the position once the stock reaches. Who responds to such schemes and what are their returns? In the December

I have a Google Home in my bathroom that I play a morning routine while I shave, brush my teeth and get ready for the day. One step is to play The Indicator podcast from Planet Money. This morning they were talking about how “2018 was one of the most volatile years on record for the stock

If you are working in finance, you have almost surely heard of risk-reward ratios and probably used some of them to evaluate the performance of a stock, ETF, or any other investment strategy. Among the different alternatives, the most popular risk-reward ratio is the so-called Sharpe ratio, first

Unless you are a die-hard buy-and-hold investor, chances are that you need to rebalance your portfolio at some point. The question is when? And how often? And why at a specific time? Some strategies rebalance once a year, some multiple times a day. What if there were better times to rebalance? Last

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

The strong breadth we have seen recently has caused the 10-day exponential moving average of the NYSE Up Issues % to rise up to 62%. A move through 61.5% after being below 40% within the last 2 weeks is considered a Zweig Breadth Thrust trigger. This is a signal created by Martin Zweig. Over the

What are the Research Questions? Can investors identify skilled and unskilled mutual fund managers by observing their tendency to herd? Do differences in herding behavior across funds predict mutual fund performance? Does skill drives the link between herding and future performance? Does herding

961%. That’s the amount of gains you would have missed had you followed the market timing strategy I’m going to describe in the following article that utilizes the CAPE ratio. Yes, that’s significant. But there’s far more to this story, and I suspect that had you acted on this strategy,

Smart beta Value ETFs are relatively homogenous Some show high exposures to other equity factors, which may represent risk Excess returns from smart beta are significantly lower than long-short factor returns INTRODUCTION The last ten years can be viewed as a lost decade for Value investors as

Portfolio risk is traditionally quantified by volatility. The benefits of diversification are measured in how portfolio volatility is changed with the addition or subtraction of different investments. Another measure of portfolio risk is the dispersion in terminal wealth: a measure that attempts to

Fundamental value seems like a straightforward investment approach. One simply looks for assets that are “cheap” or “expensive” relative to their rationally expected risk-adjusted discounted cash flows. In reality, conscientious estimation of fundamental value gaps is one of the most

Reproducible Finance with R is a clever book, with modern treatment of classical concepts. Here below is what I liked- and disliked about the book. Back when I was practicing Judo, there was a guy in my group who mastered that one exercise (called Uchi Mata). He could go fighting 20 consecutive

We can’t say with certainty where the market goes from here – whether the market will turn around in January or continue into bear territory – and neither can anyone else. What we can say for certain however is that big up days like we saw today (SPY +3.35%) are not an indicator that this

As the year turns, a common practice is to assess a portfolio and see how each position performed. The summary for stocks is easy: equities did not do well. Whether you were invested in U.S. stocks (down ~5%+), developed markets (down ~13%+), or emerging markets (down ~20%+), being invested in

Last night’s subscriber letter featured (an expanded version of) the following study, which looks at performance in the 1st couple of days following a positive 1st day of a new year. 2019-01-03 The stats and curve all suggest some immediate follow-through has been typical. There have now been 10

This is a summary of the recent performance of a wide range of excellent tactical asset allocation strategies, net of transaction costs. These strategies are sourced from books, academic papers, and other publications. While we don’t (yet) include every published TAA model, these strategies are

If you're a short seller exploring global markets, a good first question to ask is: are there shares available to borrow? This post looks at the percentage of stocks that are shortable through Interactive Brokers in each of 17 countries. Data source Interactive Brokers provides an FTP site with

Spurious results are the norm Having done a healthy share of paper replications over the past decade, and having been consistently disappointed when the models or techniques broke down on data shortly after (or even before) the authors’ sample periods, I would say that data misuse is a gigantic

A lot of research has been devoted to answering the question: do options price in the volatility risks correctly? The most noteworthy phenomenon (or bias) is called the volatility risk premium, i.e. options implied volatilities tend to overestimate future realized volatilities. Much less attention

2018 was negative for classic multi-factor portfolios Low Volatility generated the best and Value the worst performance Factor performance was homogenous across global markets INTRODUCTION We present the performance of five well-known factors on an annual basis for the last 10 years, including 2018.

I am building a small Domain Specific Language (spreadsheet style calculations) called FlatLang with some interesting properties. These are my notes. ~ FlatLang is a functional, pure, total, statically typed language. To simplify, 1) (almost) everything is a function 2) each function's

Happy New Year! In case you missed them, here were our most popular posts in 2018: Extended Backtest of Global Equity Momentum My book had dual momentum results from 1974 through 2013. With the acquisition of additional data, we are now able to show results back to 1950. We also explain why 1950 is

As 2018 comes to a close, we are thankful for all those who have read, commented upon, and shared the research that we have published this year. This year, we wrote 53 new research commentaries, averaging north of 3,000 words per piece. And we hope our approach of accessible and thoughtful

The constant leverage myth is busted: there is no spoon natural decay. DAA’s fast protective momentum approach successfully detects lower volatility regimes with higher streak potential. Smart leverage through a clever separation of signals and trades can achieve considerable outperformance even

The last day of the year used to be consistently bullish for the market. But that has changed since the turn of the century. This is true across a number of indices. The most dramatic example is the NASDAQ, which I highlighted here on the blog a few years ago. I have updated the chart below.

Each time S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes its latest Active Versus Passive Scorecard, the persistent failure of the vast majority of actively managed funds to outperform is highlighted. The evidence on this failure led Charles Ellis to call active management the loser’s game — while it’s

A theoretical paper shows that a downward shift in expected inflation increases equity valuations and credit default risk at the same time. The reason for this is “nominal stickiness”. A slowdown in consumer prices reduces short-term interest rates but does not immediately reduce earnings growth

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

Are premium toys attractive alternative investments? In their April 2018 paper entitled “LEGO – The Toy of Smart Investors”, Victoria Dobrynskaya and Julia Kishilova study LEGO sets as an alternative investment. A secondary market for these sets with 10,000+ daily transactions, affordable to

Six recent asset allocation articles (tactical or otherwise) that you might have missed: 1. Trend Following on Steroids (Wouter Keller via Alpha Architect) Wouter Keller details his latest tactical model: “Defensive Asset Allocation”. We track a number of strategies from Dr. Keller and his

This week’s commentary is a short addendum to last week’s piece, attempting to serve as a (very) brief and simplified summary of process diversification. Volatility is only one way of measuring risk; dispersion in terminal wealth is another. Using simulations of dart-throwing monkeys, we plot

In 2018 we published more than 50 research notes and 4 white papers on mainly factor investing, but also on other topics like zombie stocks, replicating private equity returns, statistical arbitrage, and mutual fund performance chasing. We would like to thank you for reading and always appreciate

Every once in a while I come across a study that reminds me an awful lot of Longfellow’s “The little girl”. 2018-12-23-2 After the strong and persistent selling over the last few days I decided to examine other times like now where the SPX dropped at least 1.5% for 3 days in a row. The study

There are reason and evidence for financial markets failing to be efficient with respect to macro trends. The main reason is cost: “tradable” economic research is expensive and investment firms will only invest in such research if their fees on expected incremental portfolio returns exceed their

This holiday season, ReSolve is offering a gift in podcast-form: a 12-episode mini-series, where we will explore, from first principles, timeless investment wisdom that will help you maximize your long-term success. From universe selection to portfolio construction, our aim is to offer you a