Undiversifiable (or systematic risk) has long been an enemy of investors. Many countercyclical strategies have been developed to counter this. However, like all insurance types, these strategies are generally costly to implement, and over time can significantly reduce portfolio returns in long...

The Baker and Wurgler (2006) sentiment index purports to measure irrational investor sentiment, while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is designed to largely reflect fundamentals. Removing this fundamental component from the Baker and Wurgler index creates an index of investor...

Sentiment indices based on investor sentiment surveys attempt to measure the stock market sentiment. The literature on these indices focusses mainly on whether investor sentiment influences the financial markets or not. But the term “sentiment” has never been defined in the literature....

News carry information of market moves. The gargantuan plethora of opinions, facts and tweets on financial business offers the opportunity to test and analyze the influence of such text sources on future directions of stocks. It also creates though the necessity to distill via statistical...

Diversification benefits depend on the correlation between assets. Unfortunately, asset correlation increases when it is most needed. We examine bond correlation using a broad sample of US corporate bonds. We find bond correlation to be higher during the financial crisis in 2008. Increased bond...

Due to differences in the effectiveness and side effects of different drugs, uncertainty is an important component of prescription drug choice. This uncertainty can cause patients and doctors to experiment with different drugs until they find a good match. In this paper, we specify and estimate...

We apply machine-learning techniques to predict drug approvals using drug-development and clinical-trial data from 2003 to 2015 involving several thousand drug-indication pairs with over 140 features across 15 disease groups. To deal with missing data, we use imputation methods that allow us to...

Thanks to a combination of scientific advances and economic incentives, the development of therapeutics to treat rare or “orphan” diseases has grown dramatically in recent years. With the advent of FDA-approved gene therapies and the promise of gene editing, many experts believe we are at an...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the DJIA index from 1897 to 2011, and use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more outperforming rules which allows...

In this study, we contribute to existing literature on momentum strategies by assessing a modified version of risk-return ratio based security selection criterion in an untested market – the KOSPI 200 over June 2006 to June 2012. Besides conventional risk-return ratios such as the Sharpe...