Which Stock Return Predictors Reflect Mispricing and Which Risk-Premia?

The degree of stock market efficiency is a fundamental question of finance with considerable implications for the efficiency of capital allocation and, hence, the real economy. Return predictability is a cornerstone that allows investors to estimate their returns with ranging precision. Some anomalies allow one to exploit loopholes in global markets and capture substantial alpha, which violates the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). However, whether this alpha arrives from risk premia or its source is mispricing is still puzzling academics around the globe, and they wrap their head around solving these tricky question.

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The Distribution of Stock Market Concentration in the U.S. Over the History

More and more, a few mega-cap companies dominate the US stock market performance. Financial journals come up with different names for those stocks every few years. They are now called the “Magnificent Seven”, but we all remember FAANG, right? Naturally, several questions arise – Is the current status quo, when the stock market capitalization is highly concentrated among the few extremely large companies, an exception or rule over history? And what’s the impact of this concentration on the performance of the one particular factor – the Size premium? We present the research paper written by Emery and Koëter that tries to answer those questions. 

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How to Build a Systematic Innovation Factor in Stocks

The aim of this article is multifold. It aims to answer the research question: does a portfolio consisting of top innovators outperform the S&P 500 index? To address this question, a strategy of investing long in top innovators according to their ranking is developed, and its performance is compared to that of the broad-based index. Based on the common belief that higher innovativeness carries higher risk, it aims to evaluate the volatility associated with innovative stocks. Additionally, it aims to analyze the impact of sector factors on the portfolio’s performance. Finally, it conducts a comparative analysis between the portfolio’s performance and that of the ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK), which specifically focuses on investing in companies relevant to the theme of disruptive innovation.

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Join the Race: Quantpedia Awards 2024 Await You

Two weeks ago, we promised you a surprise, and now it’s finally time to unveil what we have prepared for you :).

Our Quantpedia Awards 2024 aims to be the premier competition for all quantitative trading researchers. If you have an idea in your head about systematic/quantitative trading or investment strategy, and you would like to gain visibility on the professional scene, then submit your research paper, and you can compete for an attractive list of prizes. All info about the prizes, submission process, expert committee, and our partners are described in detail on our dedicated subpage: Quantpedia Awards 2024. But we will also give you a quick overview in this blog post.

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Machine Learning Execution Time in Asset Pricing

Machine Learning will quite certainly continue to be a hot topic in 2024, and we are committed to bringing you new developments and keeping you in the loop. Today, we will review original research from Demirbaga and Xu (2023) that highlights the critical role of machine learning model execution time (combination of time for ML training and prediction) in empirical asset pricing. The temporal efficiency of machine learning algorithms becomes more pivotal, given the necessity for swift investment decision-making based on the predictions generated from a lot of real-time data. Their study comprehensively evaluates execution time across various models and introduces two time-saving strategies: feature reduction and a reduction in time observations. Notably, XGBoost emerges as a top-performing model, combining high accuracy with relatively low execution time compared to other nonlinear models.

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Cyber Risk and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

In today’s fast world, where information flows freely and transactions happen at the speed of light, the significance of cybersecurity cannot be overstated. But it’s no longer just a concern for IT professionals or tech enthusiasts. The specter of well-documented hacks and phishing incidents casts a long shadow over investors, acting as powerful illustrations of how security breaches, vulnerabilities, and cyber threats can reverberate through financial markets. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the intricate relationship between cybersecurity risk and stock performance, uncovering how these digital hazards can influence financial markets.

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