In this paper, we propose a stop-loss strategy to limit the downside risk of the well-known momentum strategy. At a stop-level of 10%, we find, with data from January 1926 to December 2013, that the maximum monthly losses of the equal- and value-weighted momentum strategies go down from -49.79%...

Momentum is one of the largest and most pervasive market anomalies. However, despite a high mean and Sharpe ratio, momentum suffers from large negative skewness that comes from momentum crash periods. These crashes occur in times of both market stress and market rebound and thus variables that...

We construct a momentum factor that identifies cross-sectional winners and losers based on a weighting scheme that incorporates all the price data, over the entire lookback period, as opposed to only the first and last price points of the window. The weighting scheme is derived from the...

We provide empirical evidence that the returns on US equity momentum exhibit a time-varying skewness which deepens during dramatic losses (crashes). As a result, the dynamics of the strategy expected returns reflects the time variation in both conditional volatility and skewness. This has first...

The low degree of stock market participation (SMP) is one of the big puzzles in finance. Numerous determinants have been proposed. We put these determinants into a structure that is derived from a standard static portfolio model. Then we discuss arguments put forward regarding specific SMP...

In the context of modern portfolio theory, we compare the out-of-sample performance of 8 investment strategies which are based on statistical methods with the out-of-sample performance of a family of trivial strategies. A wide range of approaches is considered in this work, including the...

A single macroeconomic factor based on growth in the capital share of aggregate income exhibits significant explanatory power for expected returns across a range of equity characteristic portfolios and non-equity asset classes, with risk price estimates that are of the same sign and similar in...

We re-examined the seasonal pattern in the excess returns of highly visible American firms. In contrast to the seasonality for risky, less visible firms, we found that highly visible stocks display return seasonality that shows the opposite trend. Fund managers are prone to gamesmanship, putting...

Which markets do institutions use to change exposure to credit risk? Using a unique data set of transactions in corporate bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) by large financial institutions, we show that simultaneous transactions in both markets are rare, with an average institution having an...

We use unique data on banks' private risk assessments of corporate borrowers to quantify how competition among banks affect the risk sensitivity of interest rates in the Norwegian credit market. We show that an increase in competition makes corporate lending rates less sensitive to banks' own...