While macroeconomic variables have been used extensively to forecast the U.S. equity risk premium and build models to explain it, relatively little attention has been paid to the technical stock market indicators widely employed by practitioners. Our paper fills this gap by studying the...

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...

Starting from the twelve distinct risk factors in four well-established asset pricing models, a pool we refer to as the winners, we construct and compare 4,095 asset pricing models and find that the model with the risk factors, Mkt, SMB, MOM, ROE, MGMT, and PEAD, performs the best in terms of...

We use machine learning to estimate sparse principal components (PCs) for 120 monthly macro variables spanning 1960:02 to 2018:06 from the FRED-MD database. For comparison, we also extract the first ten conventional PCs from the macro variables. Each of the conventional PCs is a linear...

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 show that short interest is arguably the strongest known predictor of aggregate stock returns. It outperforms a host of popular return predictors both in and out of sample, with annual r-squared statistics of 12.89% and 13.24%, respectively. In addition, short interest can generate utility...

We investigate an important question for institutional investors — namely, which hedge fund investing styles help to hedge against bad times? We define good versus bad times as (1) up and down equity market regimes derived from the 200-day moving average of the S&P 500 price index or (2)...

Investor sentiment indicates how far an asset value deviates from its economic fundamentals. In this paper, we review various measures of investor sentiment based on market, survey, and text and media data, respectively. There is ample evidence that sentiment can explain returns on stocks that...

We use machine learning tools to analyze industry return predictability based on theinformation in lagged industry returns from across the entire economy. Controlling forpost-selection inference and multiple testing, we nd significant in-sample evidence ofindustry return predictability. Lagged...