As I wrote about last week, the absolute level of a firm’s stock price is arbitrary, as it can be easily manipulated by the firm through altering the number of shares outstanding (for example, by splitting the stock). Despite this obvious fact, the research into investor behavior has found a strong preference among individuals for…
CAPM was the first formal asset pricing model. Market beta was its sole factor. With the 1992 publication of their paper, “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns,” Eugene Fama and Kenneth French introduced a new-and-improved three-factor model, adding size and value to market beta as factors that not only provided premiums, but helped further explain…
Asset pricing models imply that equity portfolios’ time-varying exposure to the market risk and uncertainty factors carries with it positive risk premiums. Turan Bali and Hao Zhou contribute to the body of literature on this topic through the study “Risk, Uncertainty, and Expected Returns,” which appeared in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of…
Whatever your views of the candidates on the ballot next week, given the length and pervasiveness of election coverage this cycle, it’s natural to have a sense of uncertainty regarding how the outcome of the election will affect your life and, in particular, your financial plan. In times like these, when the “stomach acid test”…
Donald Trump said in the first presidential debate that not much could be learned from his tax returns. Financial advisor Tim Maurer sets the story straight, explaining exactly what… Read the rest of the article on CNBC.
The vast majority of financial trades take place in open and highly regulated markets. However, asset managers from mutual fund families sometimes offset their trades with affiliated funds in an internal market. Such cross-trading can allow fund families to shift performance from poorly performing funds to better performing funds, artificially inflating their returns. Research shows…
The absolute level of a firm’s stock price is arbitrary, as it can be easily manipulated by altering the number of shares outstanding (for example, by splitting the stock). Despite this obvious fact, research into investor behavior has found a strong preference for low-priced stocks on the part of individual investors. For instance, research has…
Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) is the world’s biggest state investor, trumping all other managed government retirement and sovereign wealth funds. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s drive to spur the Japanese economy out of its two-decade-and-growing economic slump, known as Abenomics, has pushed the GPIF to plow more money into risky investments, aiming both to…
Financial research has uncovered many relationships between investment factors and stock returns. For investors, an important question is whether the publication of this research can impact the future size of factor premiums. Asking this question is crucial on two fronts. First, if anomalies are the result of behavioral errors, or even investor preferences, and the…
As an investment style, trend-following, also referred to as time-series momentum, has existed for quite some time. Time-series momentum examines the trend of an asset with respect to its own past performance. This is different from cross-sectional momentum, which compares the performance of an asset with respect to the performance of another asset. Academic research…
Fees are at an all-time high at the nation’s big banks, while the interest they pay is at an all-time low. Worse yet, evidence recently has come to light of the criminal abuse of a practice common among large banks since the fall of Glass-Steagall: cross-selling. Cross-selling is rooted in consumer research that large financial institutions tend…
One of my favorite sayings about the market forecasts of so-called experts is from Jason Zweig, financial columnist for The Wall Street Journal: “Whenever some analyst seems to know what he’s talking about, remember that pigs will fly before he’ll ever release a full list of his past forecasts, including the bloopers.” You will almost…
Given its importance to so many investors, it’s not surprising that there has been a tremendous amount of research into the performance of actively managed mutual funds. An overwhelming body of evidence has demonstrated that the vast majority of active funds underperform their appropriate risk-adjusted benchmarks, even before considering the impact of taxes. In addition,…
The importance of actively managed mutual funds in the financial sector has led to substantial research focused on their performance. The overwhelming evidence is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to identify ahead of time the shrinking percentage of active managers who will outperform in the future. Among the reasons for the difficult nature…
As my co-author, Andrew Berkin, and I explain in our forthcoming book, “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing,” no matter how strong the evidence regarding the persistence and pervasiveness of an investment factor’s return premium, there’s some chance that the factor will experience long periods of underperformance. You can see the evidence of this in…
