This note describes the background of Factor investing in its Smart Beta form, and discusses the reasons Factor investing has become a popular investing style. We also discuss a number of reasons for skepticism regarding forward-looking expected returns

What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given $25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61 young, quantitatively trained men and women to play this...

This paper discusses serious drawbacks of existing knowledge in macroeconomics and finance in explaining and predicting economic and financial phenomena. Complexity science is proposed as an alternative approach to be used in order to better understand how economy and financial market work. This...

“… if I create high quality research, readers and other interested researchers will beat a path to my door”. WRONG. Such an approach worked well in the 19th century and seemingly for much of the 20th century. However, the way of the 21st century is for smart “consumers” of new...

Home Bias refers to the tendency to invest more heavily in one's domestic equity market than global market-value proportions would suggest. Whether or not home-biased investing makes sense, the fact is that people in pretty much every country do it. This article addresses the question of whether...

Nowadays, Sudan suffers severe financial crisis with the demise of 75% of its oil revenues that represented over 90% of its foreign currency after the secession of its Southern part after a constitutional referendum. The compensatory revenues generating economic sectors are not able in the...

The need to reduce accidents and incidents caused by human fatigue in the aviation industry remains on the National Transportation Safety Boards’ (NTSB), most wanted list. At many airlines, crewmembers are forced to work to the point of exhaustion because of: poorly scheduled duty time;...

Australian Steve Keen was, in fact, one of just 13 registered economists , out of a global total of around 36,000 (yes that really comes out as 0.04%), who actually anticipated the global financial crisis.Knowing this, I think it’s almost impossible not to want to read his latest book,...

It’s easy to overlook the fact that, in thinking about investment risk, we are implicitly making a choice about the benchmark against which risk is measured. It’s a convention, which we often take for granted, to use our local hard currency as the risk-less benchmark – but this choice,...