We explore a large sample of analysts' estimates of cost of equity capital (CoE) revealed in analysts' reports to evaluate their determinants and ability to capture expected stock returns. We first document that CoE estimates are more likely to be provided by less experienced and less busy...

In this paper, we forecast industry returns out-of-sample using the cross-section of book-to-market ratios and investigate whether investors can exploit this predictability in portfolio allocation. Cash-flow and return forecasting regressions show that cross-industry book-to-market ratios...

We survey the nascent literature on machine learning in the study of financial markets. We highlight the best examples of what this line of research has to offer and recommend promising directions for future research. This survey is designed for both financial economists interested in grasping...

We provide first empirical evidence of the long-term realized performance of alternative beta strategies. Despite diversified risk premia portfolios achieving satisfactory Sharpe ratios of 0.80 – 1.07 over the past decade, we show that up to two thirds of the performance can be explained by...

This paper introduces a new algorithm for exploiting time-series predictability-based patterns to obtain an abnormal return, or alpha, with respect to a given benchmark asset pricing model. The algorithm proposes a deterministic daily market timing strategy that decides between being fully...

This paper presents two stocks recommendation systems based on a stochastic characterization of firm present value that extends the conventional discounted cash flow analysis. In the Single-Stock Quantile recommendation system, the market price of a company's stocks is compared with the...

The same firm characteristics that help explain cross-sectional variation in expected stock returns, such as size, book-to-market and the earnings yield, also help explain cross-sectional variation in returns to trading in option-implied stock return volatility. This empirical phenomenon is...

The literature usually ascribes time-variation in discount rates to time-variation in the risk premium. This is probably also true over the short- and medium term. This paper set out to explore time-variation in investors required return over the longer term and the resulting impact on equity...

The use of fundamentalist traders in the stock market models is problematic since fundamental values in the real world are unknown. Yet, in the literature to date, fundamentalists are often required to replicate key stylized facts. The authors present an agent-based model of the stock market in...

Certain corporate transactions (eg. insider purchases and buyback announcements) are known to be robust predictors of firm-level returns. However, I empirically show equity analysts largely ignore such informative, yet subtle, signals of stocks they cover. A trading strategy that follows...