There exist two most common techniques for constructing multifactor portfolios. The mixing approach creates single-factor portfolios and then invests proportionally in each to build a multifactor portfolio. The integrated approach combines single-factor signals into a multifactor signal and then constructs a multifactor portfolio based on that multifactor signal. Which methodology is better? It is hard to tell, and numerous papers show each method’s pros and cons. The recent paper from Joris Blonk and Philip Messow explores this question from the standpoint of the credit fixed-income portfolio manager and offers their analysis, which shows that an integrated approach is probably better in this particular asset class.

The Internet (and especially the part related to finance, trading, and cryptocurrencies) can be dangerous and full of offers of guaranteed returns, pictures of forever-growing bank accounts, and guys with golden rings swimming in the bathtub filled with cash. The truth is usually less rosy. Lucrative frauds, so-called white color crimes, have always been there, but with new technologies, they can spread faster and hide under a colorful disguise. One of the oldest concepts, from the beginnings of conceptualizing probability and statistics branches of mathematics, is Martingale betting, and this method is very often exploited to lure inexperienced new traders, who are then eaten alive by marketing sharks, selling them seemingly non-losing signals. How? An interesting paper by Carlo Zarattini and Andrew Aziz sheds some some light on these schemes.

Our new study aims to investigate the lead-lag effect between prominent, widely recognized stocks and smaller, less-known stocks with similar ticker symbols (for example, TSLA / TLSA), a phenomenon that has received limited attention in financial literature. The motivation behind this exploration stems from the hypothesis that investors, especially retail investors, may inadvertently trade on less-known stocks due to ticker symbol confusion, thereby impacting their price movements in a manner that correlates with the leading stocks. By examining this potential misidentification effect, our research seeks to shed some light on this interesting factor.

The topic of today’s short blog post concerns a subject that’s connected to everybody participating in financial markets worldwide: different subjective return expectations. It is reasonable to have some expected returns you can count on if you are putting your money at risk. But how do they differ between different market professionals? And are return expectations influenced by recessions? We will look closely at financial analysts and their views on risk premia. The main point from the authors of the analyzed paper stresses the idea that analysts are counter-cyclical.

Have we mentioned, that we love history? Probably more than just once. What we like on the academic studies which use longterm data is that they offer a bird-like view on the financial markets. The daily noise and ebbs and flows retreat into the background and macroeconomic and geopolitical trends emerge. This top-down analysis helps to design the asset allocation or shape the overall structure of the portfolio of systematic trading strategies that may then trade on the higher frequency. Bryan Taylor’s paper offers a treasure of tables and charts depicting over 800 years of history of returns of global stocks, bonds and bills.

The replication crisis in social sciences (and, of course, finance) is an often covered topic (see also our articles How do Investment Strategies Perform After Publication and In-Sample vs. Out-of-Sample Analysis of Trading Strategies). In vs. out-of-sample tests are usually performed on equity factors as data are available. However, the Copenhagen Business Schools, in close cooperation with AQR Capital Management, went in a different direction and built a database of realistic corporate bond data and took a closer look at the precision of corporate bonds forecasting methodologies. We applaud them for that, as working with the corporate bond data is challenging, and their work sheds a little light on this important part of the financial markets.