What vocational lessons could we possibly learn from the 12-year-old viral sensation who just won America’s Got Talent? I don’t watch reality television contests, because as a rule, the best participants rarely participate and when they do, they almost never win. But quite randomly, a 12-year-old ukulele player named Grace VanderWaal, inspired me to break…
Time-series momentum examines the trend of an asset with respect to its own past performance. This is different than cross-sectional momentum (often referred to as Carhart momentum), which compares the performance of an asset with respect to the performance of another asset. Research into time-series momentum has found it to be persistent across both time…
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve sets a target for the federal funds rate (FFR) in an effort to influence the money supply, and in turn the broader economy. This, along with more uncommon actions like quantitative easing, is monetary policy. In a world of efficient markets, all known information is…
Even though Wall Street tries to keep alive the debate about the merits of active versus passive investing, a clear trend has emerged over the last several decades in which investors are slowly but steadily abandoning the hope of outperformance that active management offers in favor of the certainty of earning market (not average) returns…
Time-series momentum examines the trend of an asset with respect to its own past performance. This is very different than cross-sectional momentum (often referred to as Carhart momentum), which compares the performance of an asset with respect to the performance of another asset. Ian D’Souza, Voraphat Srichanachaichok, George Jiaguo Wang and Chelsea Yaqiong Yao, who…
There is a large body of academic evidence demonstrating that individual investors are subject to the “disposition effect.” Those suffering from this phenomenon, which was initially described by Hersh Shefrin and Meir Statman in their 1985 paper, “The Disposition to Sell Winners Too Early and Ride Losers Too Long: Theory and Evidence,” tend to sell…
Time-series momentum examines the trend of an asset with respect to its own past performance. This is different than cross-sectional momentum (often referred to as Carhart momentum), which compares the performance of an asset with respect to the performance of another asset. Research into time-series momentum has found it to be persistent across both time…
I have been quite surprised by the number of queries I’ve received recently from advisors and clients regarding the dire economic and market forecasts of Frank Porter Stansberry. So, I thought I would share my response. To begin, here’s the entry for him on Wikipedia: “Frank Porter Stansberry is an American financial publisher and author….
There is a large body of academic evidence demonstrating that individual investors are subject to the “disposition effect.” Those suffering from this phenomenon, which was initially described by Hersh Shefrin and Meir Statman in their 1985 paper, “The Disposition to Sell Winners Too Early and Ride Losers Too Long: Theory and Evidence,” tend to sell…
Research has established that dividend policy should be irrelevant to stock returns, yet investors have long demonstrated an irrational preference for them. Mutual fund providers are well-aware of this fact. Earlier this week, we reviewed a pair of studies showing that mutual fund managers exploit investors’ well-documented preference for cash dividends to attract assets by artificially “juicing”…
Larry Swedroe sits down to talk authorship, factor investing, smart beta and how to prevent political views from impacting your investment decisions in an interview with Robin Powell ahead of this year’s new Evidence-Based Investing Conference. Find it on EvidenceInvestor.co.uk By clicking on any of the links above, you acknowledge that they are solely for…
Insurance-linked securities (ILS) are a relatively recent financial innovation designed to allow risk to transfer from the insurance industry to the financial markets. Pension funds, banks and sovereign wealth funds are the largest holders of ILS, and hedge funds recently have started to specialize in managing ILS portfolios. Catastrophe (cat) bonds make up the largest…
Socially responsible investing, which is designed to address investors’ ethical and financial concerns, has gradually developed to include the consideration of firms’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance An interesting question is whether ESG investing has an impact on risk-adjusted returns. It certainly can lead to less efficient diversification (due to screening out companies and…
From 1927 through 2015, there has been a very large difference between the returns to the S&P 500 and the returns to risk-free Treasury bills—about 8.5% on an annual average basis and about 6.7% on an annualized basis. This large spread is frequently referred to as the equity premium puzzle, because unless investors possess implausibly…
It has long been known that many investors have a preference for cash dividends. From the perspective of classical financial theory, this behavior is an anomaly. The reason is that, in their 1961 paper, “Dividend Policy, Growth, and the Valuation of Shares,” Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani famously established that dividend policy should be irrelevant…