Short sellers often have a bad reputation, seen as market disruptors who profit from declining prices. Yet, they play a crucial role in making markets more efficient by identifying overvalued assets and correcting mispricings. A recent study uncovers another surprising aspect of their behavior: rather than just demanding liquidity, the most informed short sellers actually provide it. Using transaction-level data, the research shows that these traders supply liquidity, especially on news days and when trading on known anomalies, challenging the conventional view of short sellers as merely aggressive market participants.

Our research will explore the intriguing phenomenon of the Pre-Holiday effect in commodities, particularly crude oil and gasoline. Historical data reveals a short-term price drift prior to major U.S. holidays, suggesting a trend in these markets. We hypothesize that this anomaly may be driven by increased demand for oil and its derivatives, such as gasoline, as people prepare for travel, often by car, during the holiday season. This seasonal behavior offers unique opportunities for market participants.

In this article, we explore the historical performance of sector momentum strategies and examine how their alpha has diminished over time. By analyzing the underlying causes behind this decline, we identify key factors contributing to the underperformance. Most importantly, we introduce an enhanced approach to sector momentum, demonstrating how this solution significantly improves the performance of an ETF sector momentum strategy, making it once again an effective tool for systematic investors.

Hello all,

What have we accomplished in the last month?

– A new Optimization Report
– 11 new Quantpedia Premium strategies have been added to our database
– 12 new related research papers have been included in existing Premium strategies during the last month
– Additionally, we have produced 7 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

Today, we will venture a little into the fundamental analysis corner, and we will give you a glimpse of an intriguing paper (Hillenbrand and McCarthy, 2024) that discusses the advantages of using ‘Street’ earnings over traditional GAAP earnings. The paper suggests that ‘Street’ earnings provide better valuation estimates and improved financial analysis. Is this a way how to improve the performance of the struggling equity value factor?

Uninformed long-term investors provide an easy target for short-term traders, and they often unscrupulously take advantage of them. But ETF investors with long investment time horizons can mitigate some of the front-running costs if they take transactional costs into account to calculate whether it is economically optimal to participate in these “market games” (exchange and broker fees + classical opportunity costs of actively participating in strategy execution). Today, we will turn our attention to the paper “ETF Rebalancing, Hedge Fund Trades, and Capital Market” from Wang, Yao, and Yelekenova to better understand complex relationship between ETFs (their investors) and hedge funds.