Multifactor funds, which offer factor diversification neatly packaged in one product, have a rather short but poor track record; these funds have largely underperformed widely-available broad market funds. This article evaluates the performance of multifactor funds relative to two homemade factor...

Academics, practitioners, and investors at large typically have a preference for making decisions based on a single variable that is supposed to be maximized or minimized. This approach is usually appropriate but it may also be misleading. When selecting an optimal retirement strategy a retiree...

Although liquidity and informational efficiency, among others, are important characteristics of a securities market, they are not, or should not be, ends in themselves. From a normative point of view, the ultimate goal is to maximize the welfare of society. Therefore, the critical question about...

Beta has been a controversial measure of risk ever since it was proposed almost half a century ago, and we do not pretend to settle with this article what decades of research has not. We do, however, take advantage of the recent trend of investing in countries and industries through index funds...

The predictability of the equity risk premium is a central and controversial issue in finance. The Risk Premium Factor model is a recent and novel approach to forecasting the equity risk premium and the equity market's level and P/E. This article aims to overcome the main limitation of, and...

Academics, practitioners, and investors essentially agree that in the short term stocks are riskier than bonds. Which of these two assets is riskier in the long term, however, is controversial. This short article explores this issue by assessing long-term risk as suggested by Warren Buffett;...

Target-date funds feature asset allocations that become increasingly conservative as investors approach retirement. An important shortcoming of this strategy is that it is suboptimal in terms of capital accumulation, which begs the question of why these funds are so popular. A possible answer is...

The standard deviation, arguably the most widely-used measure of risk, suffers from at least two limitations. First, the number itself offers little insight; after all, what is the intuition behind the square root of the average quadratic deviation from the arithmetic mean return? Second,...