When a long-term investor trades a slowly changing portfolio, she is not very time sensitive to when she should place or modify her bet. Short-term information can be used to guide the investor on how to time her trades. Strategic trade modification provides exposure to short-term signals...

Litigation finance is a rapidly growing niche asset class focused on debt and equity investments in litigation claims and law firms. We find that in-sample returns in the space have been in excess of 20% annually with limited correlation to other investment areas. This apparent excess return may...

This paper proposes a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set on the three main components used in asset pricing, namely the risk physical and neutral measures and the relative pricing kernel.The analysis is carried out by means of a portfolio optimization...

We compare the performance of time-series (TS) and cross-sectional (CS) strategies based on past returns. While CS strategies are zero-net investment long/short strategies, TS strategies take on a time-varying net-long investment in risky assets. For individual stocks, the difference between the...

We examine the roles of rational and behavioural factors in explaining long-run premiums/discounts on closed-end funds, using evidence on equity funds from the US and UK. Although the processes by which fund prices converge towards long-run premiums or discounts are similar in the two countries,...

This paper examines the interaction between short-run return reversals, momentum and idiosyncratic volatility in the Australian market. We confirm that stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility earn low average returns over the next month. Unlike US studies which attribute this negative relation...

This article examines the risk and return characteristics of U.S. mutual funds. We employ an equilibrium version of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) and a principal-components-based statistical technique to identify performance benchmarks. We also consider the Capital Asset Pricing Model...

Passive investing, particularly in emerging markets, has become an increasingly popular means of quick, “diversified” exposure to a particular segment of the markets. Defensive investors, as Benjamin Graham noted, would be best served owning a diversified list of leading companies. Yet it's...

The correlation of returns for various equity asset classes has been high. In addition, the range or "dispersion" of returns across asset classes - and across sectors within those asset classes - has been low. These factors have made it difficult for active managers to outperform. But dispersion...