This paper combines the use of portfolio holdings data and conditioning information to create a new performance measure. Our conditional weight-based measure has several advantages. Using conditioning information avoids biases in weight-based measures as discussed by Grinblatt and Titman (1993)....

We test a Wall Street investment strategy known as pairs trading' with daily data over the period 1962 through 1997. Stocks are matched into pairs according to minimum distance in historical normalized price space. We test the profitability of several trading rules with six-month trading periods...

Barber and Odean study the relationship between trading activity and returns. They find that households who trade more have a lower net return than other households. They argue that these results cannot emerge from a model with rational traders and instead attribute these findings to...

We perform an experimental study of complexity to assess its effect on trading behavior, price volatility, liquidity, and trade efficiency. Subjects were asked to deduce the value of a particular asset from information they were given about the composition and price of several portfolios....

Value stocks covary with aggregate consumption more than growth stocks during periods when financial wealth is low relative to consumption. However, the conditional value premium does not exhibit such countercyclical behavior. Consequently, a one-factor conditional consumption-based asset...

This paper shows how lifelong survival-contingent payouts can enhance investor wellbeing in the context of a portfolio choice model which integrates uninsurable labor income and asymmetric mortality expectations. Our model generates optimal asset location patterns indicating how much to hold in...

Are excess returns predictable and if so, what does this mean for investors? Previous literature has tended toward two polar viewpoints: that predictability is useful only if the statistical evidence for it is incontrovertible, or that predictability should affect portfolio choice, even if the...

This paper studies the impact of the portfolio constraint imposed by the consumption demand for housing (the 'housing constraint') on the household's optimal holdings of financial assets. Since the ratio of housing to net worth declines as the household accumulates wealth, the housing constraint...

We analyze the advice contained in a sample of 237 investment letters over the 1980-1992 period. Each newsletter recommends a mix of equity and cash. We construct portfolios based on these recommendations and find that only a small number of the newsletters appear to have higher average returns...

Extremely long odds accompany the chance that spurious-regression bias accounts for investor sentiment's observed role in stock-return anomalies. We replace investor sentiment with a simulated persistent series in regressions reported by Stambaugh, Yu and Yuan (2012), who find higher long-short...