The US Treasury effectively ”owns” about 24% of the stocks held by high income US taxable investors. Through the capital gains tax, Uncle Sam has an effective exposure of more than $1 trillion of equities. And this huge-but-silent investor might be about to get a lot bigger if capital gains...

The bedrock of financial economics is that there should be a tradeoff between risk and reward: an investment with low risk should have a low expected return, while one that could make you rich should also be one which could lose you a lot of money. A lot of research in finance is focused on...

In this short note, we show investors one way to calculate ideal investment sizing by using two rules of thumb based on a simple outline of individual risk aversion. We illustrate these two heuristics, which are not widely appreciated, with thought experiments involving coin flips and ketchup &...

In the past 20 years, momentum or trend following strategies have become an established part of the investor toolbox. We introduce a new way of analyzing momentum strategies by looking at the information ratio (IR, average return divided by standard deviation). We calculate the theoretical IR of...

The motivation for this paper is to apply a statistical arbitrage technique of pairs trading to high-frequency equity data and compare its profit potential to the standard sampling frequency of daily closing prices. We use a simple trading strategy to evaluate the profit potential of the data...

The motivation for this paper is to find out whether exchange traded funds (ETFs) are more suitable financial instruments for a pair trading strategy than stocks. The main advantage of pair trading ETFs is that ETFs cannot go bankrupt, which is not the case for shares. Thus, one of the greatest...

Ever since Harry Markowitz published his seminal paper on portfolio selection, investors have incorporated estimates of future volatilities and correlations into their asset allocation process. While portfolio construction methods continue to evolve, many investors continue to forecast...

When an event is anticipated, the firm's stock return around the announcement of the event may have an inconsistent sign: a positive sign around negative news, or vice versa. We attempt to quantify the frequency of this problem, first with a brief mathematical model and simulation, then with...

Since Bachelier's thesis in 1900 (laying the foundation of the stochastic process, or Brownian motion, as a model of stock price changes), attempts at understanding the nature of prices and at predicting them have failed. Statistical methods have only found minor regularities/anomalies, and...

The motivation for this paper is to show that even a simple strategy based on conditional autocorrelation can give traders an edge. Our simple mean reversion strategy takes the position in a pair consisting of Exchange traded funds (ETFs) or shares based on the normalized previous period's...