Vol. 19, No. 2, 2021 Arun Muralidhar Investment managers require a consistent asset pricing model, asset allocation recommendations, and risk-adjusted performance measures (or the “three facets of investing”) to be effective in managing portfolios. Incorporating three critical realities of investing into these models (i.e., that investors have many stochastic goals, seek to delegate to skillful… Read more
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Comovement, Liquidity and Asymmetries
Vol. 19, No. 1, 2021 James X. Xiong Substantially increased institutional investing and index trading in the US stock market have a meaningful impact on the mechanical relationship between return comovement and liquidity, which can be quantified by a power-law function and explained by a liquidity supply model. Three well-documented asymmetries (asymmetric volume, asymmetry in… Read more
Idiosyncratic Risk and When to Tilt Toward Value
Vol. 19, No. 1, 2021 Jason D. Fink and Kristin E. Fink While the outperformance of value relative to growth portfolios has been well established, there is still debate over whether this outperformance is the result of a systematic risk factor or a behavioral tendency. The distinction is crucial to determining the expected returns of… Read more
Lending to Lose: Who Buys Negatively Yielding Bonds and What it Means for Investors
Vol. 19, No. 1, 2021 Vineer Bhansali I discuss the demand and supply of negatively yielding bonds, which is a recent and relatively unprecedented phenomenon in financial markets. To understand why one would lend to lose, I classify buyers into three categories, i.e. “forced buyers”, “speculators” and “non-financial government entities”. I conclude that the demand… Read more
Investment Style Volatility and Mutual Fund Performance
Vol. 19, No. 1, 2021 Keith C. Brown, W. V. Harlow and Hanjiang Zhang We develop a holdings-based statistic to measure the volatility of a fund’s investment style characteristic profile over time. On average, funds with lower levels of style volatility significantly outperform more style-volatile funds on a risk-adjusted basis. We show that style volatility… Read more
Active Investing and the Efficiency of Security Markets
Vol. 19, No. 1, 2021 Russ Wermers This study investigates the impact of active investment management on the efficiency of public security markets. The scholarly literature indicates that active management contributes to market efficiency, thereby providing positive externalities for all investors, including investors in passively-managed funds. Contrary to popular interpretations of Sharpe’s (1991) “active arithmetic,”… Read more
Multi-Period Portfolio Selection: A Practical Simulation-Based Framework
What Drives Active Share? Active Stock Selection or Active Stock Weights
Vol. 18, No. 3, 2020 Aymen Karoui and Saurin Patel Active Share is a popular measure of active management. However, it is not clear what drives Active Share. To improve our understanding, we decompose Active Share into Active Stock Selection (ASE) and Active Stock Weights (ASW). ASE captures portfolio weights in stocks outside the portfolio… Read more
A Six-Component Integrated Approach to Addressing the Retirement Funding Challenge
Vol. 18, No. 3, 2020 Robert C. Merton and Arun Muralidhar This paper offers an integrated approach to addressing the global retirement funding challenge, especially in light of the coronavirus shock that has created an unanticipated and unprecedented impact on lifetime income/consumption. It frames the problem in a six-component approach to the funding challenge with… Read more
How Much Can Collective Defined Contribution Plans Improve Risk-Sharing?
Vol. 18, No. 3, 2020 Deborah Lucas and Daniel Smith Collective Defined Contribution (CDC) plans have been suggested as an attractive and sustainable alternative to public sector DB plans. A CDC plan is a hybrid structure, designed to provide more predictable retirement benefits than a traditional DC plan while operating at the lower cost of… Read more