We combine self-collected historical data from 1867 to 1907 with CRSP data from 1926 to 2012, to examine the risk and return over the past 140 years of one of the most popular mechanical trading strategies - momentum. We find that momentum has earned abnormally high risk-adjusted returns - a...

We estimate MIDAS regressions with various (bi)power variations to predict future volatility measured via increments in quadratic variation. Instead of pre-determining the (bi)power variation we parameterize it and estimate the intra-daily return power transformation that optimally predicts...