We survey the literature on stock return forecasting, highlighting the challenges faced by forecasters as well as strategies for improving return forecasts. We focus on U.S. equity premium forecastability and illustrate key issues via an empirical application based on updated data. Some studies...

Can the degree of predictability found in the data be explained by existing asset pricing models? We provide two theoretical upper bounds on the R-squares of predictive regressions. Using data on the market and component portfolios, we find that the empirical R-squares are significantly greater...

This paper proposes a two-state predictive regression model and shows that stock market 12-month return (TMR), the time-series momentum predictor of Moskowitz, Ooi, and Pedersen (2012), forecasts the aggregate stock market negatively in good times and positively in bad times. The out-of-sample...

We construct an information factor (INFO) using the informed stock buying of corporate insiders and the informed selling of short sellers and option traders. INFO strongly predicts future stock returns -- a long-short portfolio formed on INFO earns monthly alphas of 1.24%, substantially...

We analyze the joint out-of-sample predictive ability of a comprehensive set of 299 firm characteristics for cross-sectional stock returns. We develop a cross-sectional out-of-sample R2 statistic that provides an informative measure of the accuracy of cross-sectional return forecasts in terms of...

We study how equity option trading affects the market risk premium. We find that a measure of aggregate call order imbalance (ACIB), defined as the cross-sectional average of the difference between open-buy and open-sell volume, negatively forecasts future stock market returns significantly from...

Asset returns change with fundamentals and other factors, such as technical information and sentiment over time. In modeling time-varying expected returns, this article focuses on the out-of-sample predictability of the aggregate stock market return via extensions of the conventional predictive...

We provide a short and selected review of the vast literature on cross-section predictability. We focus on the state of art methods used to forecast the cross-section of stock returns with major predictors and are primarily interested in the ideas, methods, and their applications. To understand...

We present significant evidence of out-of-sample equity premium predictability for a host of industrialized countries over the postwar period. There are important differences, however, in the nature of equity premium predictability between the United States and other developed countries. Taken...

We investigate lead-lag relationships among country stock returns and identify a leading role for the United States: lagged U.S. returns significantly predict returns in numerous non-U.S. industrialized countries (after controlling for national economic variables and countries' own lagged...