Gold’s Rally and the Gold Mining Stocks Trap

Gold has been in the headlines lately as it climbs to new highs, prompting many investors to look for ways to benefit from the rally. However, many institutional investors – such as mutual funds and pension funds – face restrictions on buying physical gold or gold-backed ETFs. Instead, they often turn to gold mining stocks to gain indirect exposure to gold’s price. That approach seems logical on the surface: mining stocks typically offer leveraged exposure to gold’s movements. But as highlighted by Dirk G. Baur, Allan Trench, and Lichoo Tay in their recent study “Gold Shares Underperform Gold Bullion”, this strategy can be misleading. The authors demonstrate that, over the long run, gold mining shares structurally underperform physical gold itself.

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Cross-Sectional and Dollar Components of Currency Risk Premia

Currency strategies often appear simple on the surface – go long high-yielding currencies, short low-yielding ones, or take a position on the U.S. dollar. But these trades actually mix two distinct components: a Dollar component, which bets on broad movements of the U.S. dollar against all others, and a Cross-Sectional (CS) component, which exploits relative differences across countries. The question is, which of these components really drives currency risk premia? A new paper by Vahid Rostamkhani tackles this long-standing question by decomposing the predictive power of eleven macroeconomic fundamentals—such as interest rates, inflation, unemployment, and fiscal variables—into these two components across almost a century of data (1926-2023). This approach directly tests whether it is more rewarding to time the dollar itself or to focus on cross-country fundamental spreads.

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What Drives the Excess Bond Premium?

The Excess Bond Premium (EBP – the portion of corporate bond spreads not explained by default risk), a key metric in quantitative finance for gauging credit spreads, has long been a subject of intense scrutiny. Recent research sheds new light on its dynamics, moving beyond traditional macroeconomic factors to explore the role of information flow. By analyzing news attention across 180 topics, a significant portion of the EBP’s variation can be explained, offering a novel lens to understand its fluctuations and predictive power.

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Quantpedia in August 2025

Hello all,

What have we accomplished in the last month?

– Parametrization of the Trading Edge and Technical Analysis reports
– 12 new Quantpedia Premium strategies have been added to our database
– 11 new related research papers have been included in existing Premium strategies during the last month
– Additionally, we have produced 9 new backtests written in QuantConnect code
– 5 new blog posts that you may find interesting have been published on our Quantpedia blog in the previous month

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Surprisingly Profitable Pre-Holiday Drift Signal for Bitcoin

Cryptocurrency markets have matured into a distinct asset class characterized by extreme volatility, deep liquidity pools, and worldwide retail participation. Traditional equity and commodity markets exhibit a well-documented pre-holiday effect, where returns on trading days immediately preceding public holidays tend to outperform other days. Given that Bitcoin is often described as the archetypal absolute risk asset, it is natural to hypothesize that any calendar-driven anomalies observed in equities should manifest—or even amplify—in crypto markets.

However, unlike equity markets, where institutional investors and marketing calendars drive collective behavior, crypto markets are more dispersed, retail-dominated, and influenced by nontraditional information flows. This article investigates whether the classic pre-holiday effect applies to Bitcoin and assesses the extent to which it can be amplified by an attention-grabbing momentum filter based on local price highs.

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How Can We Explain the Low-Risk Anomaly?

The low-risk anomaly in financial markets has puzzled researchers and investors, challenging the traditional risk-return paradigm (higher risk->higher return). This phenomenon, where low-risk assets outperform their high-risk counterparts on a risk-adjusted basis, has been observed across various asset classes, including stocks and mutual funds. What may be the possible explanation? Pass-through mutual funds, which aim to replicate the performance of specific market indices, play a crucial role in this context by channeling investor flows and potentially influencing asset prices through demand pressure.

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