We show that fund-specific return skewness is associated with managerial skill and future hedge fund performance. Specifically, skewness in fund returns reflects managerial skill in avoiding large drawdowns. Using a new measure of investment skill that accounts for this managerial ability, we...

We examine the predictive power of the CDS-bond basis for future corporate bond returns. We find that residual basis, the part of the CDS-bond basis that cannot be explained by a wide range of market frictions such as counterparty risk, funding risk, and liquidity risk, strongly negatively...

The formation period return difference between past winners and losers, which I call the momentum gap, negatively predicts momentum profits. I document this for the U.S. stock market and find consistent results across 21 major international markets. A one standard deviation increase in the...

We propose a new investor sentiment index that is aligned with the purpose of predicting the aggregate stock market. By eliminating a common noise component in sentiment proxies, the new index has much greater predictive power than existing sentiment indices both in- and out-of-sample, and the...

We apply four machine learning methods to cross-sectional return prediction for hedge fund selection. We equip the forecast model with a set of idiosyncratic features, which are derived from historical returns of a hedge fund and capture a variety of fund-specific information. Evaluating the...

We decompose the quadratic payoff on a stock into its loss and gain components and measure the premia associated with their fluctuations, called the loss and gain quadratic risk premium (QRP) respectively. The loss QRP interprets as the premium paid for downside risk hedging, while the gain QRP...

Based on data until the mid 2000s, oil price changes were shown to predict international equity index returns with a negative predictive slope. Extending the sample to 2015, we document that this relationship has been reversed over the last ten years and therefore has not been stable over time....

This paper suggests a novel approach for predicting aggregate stock returns at quarterly and annual frequencies. Weak return predictability is consistent with the view that a stationary component of stock prices is highly persistent. In such cases, expected returns are time-varying but also...

This paper constructs and analyzes various measures of trading costs in US equity markets covering the period 1926–2015. These measures contain statistically and economically significant predictive signals for stock market returns and real economic activity. We decompose illiquidity proxies...

The experimental approach is applied to explore the value of unidentified historical information in stock-return prediction. Return sequences were randomly drawn cross section and time from historical S&P500 data. Subjects were requested to predict returns or select stocks from 12 preceding...