Long-term expected returns appear to vary little, if at all, in the cross section of stocks. We devise a bootstrapping procedure that injects small amounts of variation into expected returns and show that even negligible differences in expected returns, if they existed, would be easy to detect....

A strategy that selects stocks based on their historical same-calendar-month returns earns an average return of 13% per year. We document similar return seasonalities in anomalies, commodities, international stock market indices, and at the daily frequency. The seasonalities overwhelm...