After reviewing the methodologies behind the more popular quantitative investment strategies offered to investors as passive equity indices, the authors devised an integrated evaluation framework. They found that the strategies outperform their cap-weighted counterparts largely owing to exposure...

Numerous studies show that most active managers fail to deliver alpha over time, net of fees; yet investors continue to pay high fees for active management. This article asks why investors persist in such seemingly irrational behavior. As long as active managers can keep on charging high fees,...

It is well established that stocks with lower price fluctuations tend to outperform riskier ones. This article reviews plausible explanations for the low volatility anomaly and reproduce the performance of low volatility strategies in different market environments as well as in different...

The active shares of traditional value style indexes are dominated by industry bets. They also capture less than the entire value premium; because they weight constituents on the basis of capitalization, they tend to hold large positions in overpriced stocks and small positions in underpriced...

Twenty years ago there were only five equity factors (market, value, small-cap, momentum, and low beta). Today the literature contains research papers on hundreds of supposed factors, most of which will not produce a reliable positive premium in the future. Rather than adopting a statistical...

For investors, one question stands above all others: “How do we identify outperforming managers?” Every year, institutional investors issue hundreds of RFPs seeking managers to replace those who have underperformed. In aggregate, asset owners and investment consultants spend vast amounts of...

Covered call buy–write strategies have risk–return profiles that are similar to those of low volatility equity portfolios, and both approaches appear to extract return premium from investors with leverage constraints and a preference for lottery-like bets. We analyzed simulated long-term...

This paper examines the relationship between cultural attitudes towards gambling and investor preferences for skewness across 45 countries. Our results show that countries with higher gambling losses per adult, countries with legalized online gambling, and countries with the most Catholics...

Chinese fund manager performance is interesting because in a market dominated by speculative retail trading, we expect professional fund managers to have persistent edge. Using data on the Chinese mutual fund industry, the authors compute a new skill measure to identify exceptional funds with...

We price corporate debt from a structural model of firm default. We assume that the capital market brings about efficient firm default when the continuation value of the firm falls below the value it would have after bankruptcy restructuring. This characterization of default makes the model more...