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...

On 8 October 2015, CFA Montréal hosted its annual Asset Allocation Forum under the theme “Portfolio Structuring and the Value of Forecasting.” Two asset management approaches were compared: • The factor investing approach, which relies on identifying common factors in security returns...

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...

We use boosted decision trees to generate daily out-of-sample forecasts of excess returns for Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two best-known and largest cryptocurrencies. The decision trees incorporate information from 39 predictors, including variables relating to cryptocurrency fundamentals,...

Welch and Goyal (2008) find that numerous economic variables with in-sample predictive ability for the equity premium fail to deliver consistent out-of-sample forecasting gains relative to the historical average. Arguing that model uncertainty and instability seriously impair the forecasting...