Factor investing has failed to live up to its many promises. Its success is compromised by three problems that are often underappreciated by investors. First, many investors develop exaggerated expectations about factor performance as a result of data mining, crowding, unrealistic trading cost...

Stocks tend to earn high or low returns relative to other stocks every year in the same month (Heston and Sadka 2008). We show these seasonalities are balanced out by seasonal reversals: a stock that has a high expected return relative to other stocks in one month has a low expected return...

Stocks earn significantly negative abnormal returns before earnings announcements and positive after them. This "earnings announcement return cycle" (EARC) is unrelated to the earnings announcement premium, and it is a feature of stocks widely covered by analysts. Analysts' forecasts follow the...

When agents can learn about their abilities as active investors, they rationally quot;trade to learnquot; even if they expect to lose from active investing. The model used to develop this insight draws conclusions that are consistent with empirical study of household trading behavior:...

Using a dataset of $17 trillion of assets under management, we document that actively-managed institutional accounts outperformed strategy benchmarks by 86 (42) basis points gross (net) during 2000–2012. In return, asset managers collected $162 billion in fees per year for managing 29% of...

Using data spanning the 20th century, we show that most accounting-based return anomalies are spurious. When examined out-of-sample by moving either backward or forward in time, anomalies' average returns decrease, and volatilities and correlations with other anomalies increase. The...

Only those high B/M firms that have decreased in size earn the value premium. These firms follow conservative investment policies, while those high B/M firms that do not earn the value premium generate low cash flows. This difference explains why HML is redundant in some asset pricing models...

Long-term expected returns do not appear to vary in the cross section of stocks. We show that even negligible persistent differences in expected returns, if they existed, would be easy to detect. Markers of such differences, however, are absent from actual stock returns. Our results are...

Past industry returns predict the cross section of industry returns, and this predictability is at its strongest at the one-month horizon (Moskowitz and Grinblatt 1999). We show that the cross section of factor returns shares this property, and that industry momentum stems from factor momentum....