Resources

The Volatility of Active Management

S&P Dow Jones Indices has long provided a great service to investors with its semi-annual S&P Indices Versus Active (SPIVA) scorecards. The evidence offered in these reports has shown time and again that, regardless of the asset class, the vast majority of active managers persistently fail to outperform their benchmarks, and that there is little to…

Diversification For The Long Term

ETF

The table below, taken from the newly released book I co-authored with Andrew Berkin, “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing,” shows the annual premium and Sharpe ratio for the equity factors of market beta, size, value, momentum, profitability and quality. It also shows the odds that each premium will produce a negative return over various…

New Book Shines Light On Momentum

ETF

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. This is a big problem for the efficient markets hypothesis, as there’s no coherent risk-based explanation for momentum’s performance. Not only has there…

Factor-Based Investing: A Q&A With Larry Swedroe

Larry Swedroe discusses his new book, “Your Complete Guide To Factor-Based Investing,” as well as the theory behind factor strategies and how investors can achieve their risk and return objectives through them, in a recent Q&A. Find it on MutualFunds.com By clicking on any of the links above, you acknowledge that they are solely for…

The Guide to Happy Giving

The giving season is underway, with the holidays and year-end bearing down on us. So how can we transform one of the more stressful, and sometimes guilt-ridden, elements of the season into something more life-giving? Whether you’re giving to a family member, a friend or a cause, please consider the following four directives as a…

An Interesting Test of Market Efficiency

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…

“Free Lunch” Investing Takes Time to Cook

As the director of research for The BAM Alliance, I’ve been getting lots of calls recently from investors questioning their international equity investments. This hasn’t been a surprise, as any time an asset class does poorly, a significant number of investors will question why they own that asset. One particular inquiry I received addressed the…

The Truth About Stock Prices

ETF

In the last few weeks, I’ve unpacked studies addressing both the nominal price illusion and the nominal price premium. So today I’ll answer a related question: Do nominal stock prices really matter? Because the level of a company’s stock price is arbitrary—it can be manipulated, for example, by firms via adjustments in the number of…

Low Priced Stocks No Bargain

ETF

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…

Bottom-Up Works Best With Multiple Factors

ETF

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…

How Risk & Uncertainty Affect Returns

ETF

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…

Cross Trading Boosts Mutual Funds Returns

ETF

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…

©2024 JMF Capstone Wealth Management