The “real” price of gold in the U.S. is historically high, relative to its history as an actively tradable asset. But what about the real price of gold in other countries? It turns out that, in our impressionistic sample of 23 countries, the real price of gold is high everywhere. The real...

Investors face a number of challenges when seeking to estimate the prospective performance of a long-only investment in commodity futures. For instance, historically, the average annualized excess return of individual commodity futures has been approximately zero and commodity futures returns...

Investors face numerous challenges when seeking to estimate the prospective performance of a longonly investment in commodity futures. For instance, historically, the average annualized excess return of the average individual commodity futures has been approximately zero and commodity futures...

A mechanical rebalancing strategy, such as a monthly or quarterly reallocation towards fixed portfolio weights, is an active strategy. Winning asset classes are sold and losers are bought. During crises, when markets are often trending, this can lead to substantially larger drawdowns than a...

We contrast the time-series and cross-sectional performance of three popular investment strategies: carry, momentum and value. While considerable research has examined the performance of these strategies in either a directional or cross-asset settings, we offer some insights on the market...

The existing replication policies at top finance journals are far weaker than the policies at top economics journals. This paper explores both the costs and benefits of having a stronger replication policy in the context of my failed 2010 initiative to develop a unified policy across all top...

Long-only commodity futures returns have been very disappointing over the last decade, leading some to wonder if it was a mistake to invest in commodities. The poor performance is the result of poor “income returns” and not of falling commodity prices. This observation may be surprising for...

Impact costs occur when large buy or sell orders move market prices. The measurement of these costs is crucial for the evaluation of potential trading strategies as well as the successful execution of systematic investment strategies. However, common approaches suffer from a type of myopia:...

In this era of inexpensive computation and vast data, systematic, or algorithmically driven, investment is increasingly popular. Systematic strategies appear in stand-alone products as well in tail-hedging and defensive-overlay strategies. Indeed, given the enormous growth in data, it is...

Turning points are the Achilles' heel of time-series momentum portfolios. Slow signals fail to react quickly to changes in trend while fast signals are often false alarms. We examine theoretically and empirically how momentum portfolios of various intermediate speeds, formed by blending slow and...