We examine the statistical power of fundamental and behavioural factors with regards to stock returns of the Dow Jones Industrials Index. With a novel sentiment dataset from over 3.6 million Reuters news articles, we find significant correlations between Reuters sentiment and stock returns. We...

The Baker and Wurgler (2006) sentiment index purports to measure irrational investor sentiment, while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is designed to largely reflect fundamentals. Removing this fundamental component from the Baker and Wurgler index creates an index of investor...

Average skewness, which is defined as the average of monthly skewness values across firms, performs well at predicting future market returns. This result still holds after controlling for the size or liquidity of the firms or for current business cycle conditions. We also find that average...

We build a macroeconomic model for Switzerland, the Euro Area, and the USA that drives the dynamics of several asset classes and the liabilities of a representative Swiss (defined-contribution) pension fund. This encompassing approach allows us to generate correlations between returns on assets...

Noisy markets need extensive descriptions that are noisy themselves, such as deep regression trees that capture many data-local nonlinear anomalies and that do not require arbitrary weighting schemes like traditional linear multifactor models often do. Simple tools allow extraction of general...

Changes in shipping freight rates predict stock market returns. In today's global world, where economies are linked through international trade, shipping freight rates carry information about economic activity which is reflected in stock returns. Our results are statistically and economically...

When Capital Asset pricing Model (CAPM) is considered as valid asset pricing theory, Security Market Line (SML) is supposed to give ex-ante returns for the single period investment horizon. Since the required returns should be same as the cost of equity (discount rates) in efficient markets, SML...

The study introduces empirical evidence that there are statistically significant relationships between intensity of upcoming aggregate merger activity and the present values of the factors HML and SMB in the Fama-French three-factor model of assets pricing

Which trading strategies differentiate skilled mutual fund managers from their unsuccessful peers? This study provides evidence for a positive association between holdings' implied cost of capital (ICC) and future fund performance. Consistent with large transaction costs of ICC-based investments...

Recent research suggests that machine learning models dominate traditional linear models in predicting cross-sectional stock returns. We confirm this finding when predicting one-month forward-looking returns based on a set of common stock characteristics, including predictors such as short-term...