Technical trading strategies assume that past changes in prices help predict future changes. This makes sense if the past price trend reflects fundamental information that has not yet been fully incorporated in the current price. However, if the past price trend only reflects temporary pricing...

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...

Presentation Slides for "Overconfidence, Arbitrage, and Equilibrium Asset Pricing" This paper offers a model in which asset prices reflect both covariance risk and misperceptions of firmsapos prospects, and in which arbitrageurs trade against mispricing. In equilibrium, expected returns are...

We analyze a model with information asymmetry where owning stock confers direct utility, in addition to impacting wealth. In contrast to settings based on wealth considerations alone, expected stock prices deviate from expected fundamentals even when assets are in zero net supply. Stocks that...

Movements in expected returns (ER) can cause a bias in measured autocorrelations, and the resulting spurious component is positive for infrequent regime shifts. We demonstrate this point analytically and investigate its empirical prevalence. In a key contribution, we use shifts in ex ante ER...

Rationality would suggest that advice-seeking investors receive benefits from costly financial advice. However, evidence documenting these benefits for U.S. investors has so far been lacking. This paper is the first to document that U.S. mutual fund investors indeed receive one of the many...

Rationality suggests that advice-seeking investors receive benefits from financial advice that are comparable in value to the fees paid for such advice. However, empirical evidence documenting these benefits for U.S. investors has so far been lacking. We document that U.S. mutual fund investors...

Whether financial advisors provide useful services for clients that seek to invest in mutual funds remains an open question. We are the first to show that financial advisors generate tangible benefits for their clients in the form of useful tax advice. Specifically, financial advisors help...

This study shows that financial advisors provide useful tax advice to their clients, being the first to provide evidence of tangible benefits delivered by financial advisors in the U.S. We find that investors who purchase mutual fund shares through financial advisors exhibit a stronger tendency...

In this paper we develop the first estimator of the covariance matrix that relies solely on forward-looking information. This estimator only uses price information from a cross-section of plain-vanilla options. In an out-of-sample study for US blue-chip stocks we show that a minimum-variance...