Earlier this week, we examined a study that sought to determine whether the publication of academics’ findings on the momentum factor have led to a disappearing premium. To review, Steven Dolvin and Bryan Foltice, authors of the 2016 study “Where Has the Trend Gone? An Update on Momentum Returns in the U.S. Stock Market,” found…
Since her early 20s, Danica Patrick has driven a racecar for a living, speeding 200 miles per hour around a crowded track bordered by concrete walls. It’s dangerous. Really dangerous. And she recognizes that. “There are things that happen in the car that you can’t plan for and that are out of your control, like…
A large body of research on the behavior of individual investors has demonstrated that low levels of financial knowledge, in addition to biases in the selection and processing of information, drive suboptimal financial choices. Among the findings from the literature are: Men tend to be more financially literate than women, independent of country of residence,…
Online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending is emerging as a provider of credit to individuals as well as small businesses, with the potential to benefit borrowers (by reducing the high cost of bank credit, credit card debt and payday loans) and lenders (by providing opportunities to earn higher yields). A significant hurdle for investors, however, is the…
At one point near the end of July, using data from Bloomberg, the 10-year Treasury note was yielding 1.47% and 10-year AAA-rated municipals were yielding a virtually identical 1.46%. From a tax perspective, given their federal tax exemption (and for most residents buying their own state’s bonds, a local tax exemption as well) we would…
Idiosyncratic (also referred to as nonsystematic) risk is specific to a single asset or to a small group of assets. Idiosyncratic risk has little or no correlation with market risk. Therefore, it can be substantially mitigated or eliminated by sufficiently diversifying a portfolio. Because it can be mitigated, investors aren’t rewarded with higher expected returns…
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. Mark Carhart, in his 1997 study “On Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance,” was the first to use momentum, together with the three Fama-French…
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 my…
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…