Volume 13, Number 3, (2015) David Blake, Alberto Rossi, Allan Timmermann, Ian Tonks and Russ Wermers The past few decades have seen a major shift from centralized to decentralized investment management by pension fund sponsors, despite the increased coordination problems that this brings. Using a unique, proprietary dataset of pension sponsors and managers, we identify… Read more
Articles
Investing in the Asset Growth Anomaly Across the Globe
Volume 13, Number 4, 2015 Xi Li and Rodney N. Sullivan We document the existence of an anomalous asset growth effect globally and find that it comprises some combination of a market mispricing and some pervasive global systematic risk. To support our findings, we explore a battery of tests to include how country-level governance and… Read more
Efficiently Combining Multiple Sources of Alpha
Volume 13, Number 4, 2015 Jose Menchero and Jyh-Huei Lee In this article, we examine the question of efficiently combining multiple sources of alpha. We begin with a comparison of the various methods used by practitioners for constructing portfolios that capture a single alpha signal. These methods are broadly categorized as either: (a) simple factor… Read more
Fundamental Indexation and the Fama-French Three Factor Model: Risk Assimilation or Stock Mispricing?
Volume 13, Number 4, Fourth Quarter 2015 Xiaofeng Shi, Mike Dempsey and Laurence Irlicht We confirm the outperformance of fundamental indexation (FI) portfolio returns as due to an exploitation of stock mispricing, while, simultaneously, largely explained in terms of the Fama–French three-factor (FF-3F) model. This leads us to conclude that rather than FI representing a… Read more
Funding Translational Medicine via Public Markets: The Business Development Company
Volume 13, Number 4, Fourth Quarter 2015 Sandra M. Forman, Andrew W. Lo, Monica Shilling and Grace K. Sweeney A business development company (BDC) is a type of closed-end investment fund with certain relaxed requirements that allow it to raise money in the public equity and debt markets, and can be used to fund multiple… Read more
Optimal Municipal Bond Portfolios for Dynamic Tax Management
Volume 14, Number 1, 2016 Andrew Kalotay As currently practiced, tax-loss selling of municipal bonds is typically an ad hoc year-end exercise. Under dynamic tax management the right to execute a tax-beneficial trade is considered to be a valuable option. Selling a bond and reinvesting in another entails swapping the associated tax options. The generalized… Read more
The Information Content of Analysts’ Recommendations Revisited
Volume 14, Number 1, 2016 Daniel Bradley, Jonathan Clarke, Suzanne Lee and Chayawat Ornthanalai Bradley et al. (BCLO, 2014) find evidence that the time stamps reported in I/B/E/S for analysts’ recommendations are systematically delayed giving the appearance that recommendations are uninformative.We review the findings of BCLO and extend their analyses along three dimensions. First, we… Read more
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Popular Asset Pricing Models
Volume 14, Number 1, 2016 Bradford Cornell and Jason Hsu The assumption that asset prices are determined by the efforts of end investors to maximize intertemporal utility supports a pricing theory that is both elegant and intuitive. Unfortunately, the assumption is counterfactual. End investors, with few exceptions, lack the capacity to behave in a fashion… Read more
Tax-Cognizant Portfolio Analysis: A Methodology for Maximizing After-
Volume 14, Number 1, 2016 Kenneth A. Blay and Harry M. Markowitz The most prevalent methods of incorporating taxes into the portfolio construction process are the preliminary adjustment of asset allocation inputs for taxes and the post-optimization application of asset location heuristics. We argue that these methods are unsatisfactory in that they fail to address… Read more
Factor Misalignment And Portfolio Construction
Volume 14, Number 2, 2016 Jose Menchero In recent years, there has been heightened interest among practitioners in the topic of factor misalignment; this term refers to the practice of employing mean-variance optimization to construct portfolios when the alpha signal is not contained within the set of risk model factors. In this paper, we employ… Read more