Stock prices react to the new information that investors continually receive from many sources. There are some major events, which are commonly connected with a new piece of information and subsequent reactions of investors. For example, quarterly earnings-announcements are the cause of the post-earnings announcement drift or PEAD. According to the PEAD, prices tend to continue to drift up (down) after positive (negative) news. But news related to quarterly announcements is not the only important information. A novel research paper written by the Hong and Yu explores implications of the month-end reporting, analyst revisions and management guidance that are coming to market usually in the first half of each month and are also connected with drifts that offer practitioners profitable opportunities.

Authors: Claire Yurong Hong and Jialin Yu

Title: Month-End Reporting, Cash-Flow News, and Asset Pricing

Equity factors are not as straightforward as they may seem to be. There is an ongoing debate about their usability or expected return since they have a cyclical nature. Moreover, the modern trend of smart beta only fuels this debate. Novel research by Blitz and Hanauer examines the size factor and sheds some light on this elusive anomaly. The size seems to be weak as a stand-alone factor, but it’s far from useless. The academic paper suggests that the size factor can be an important addition to the other equity factors as it helps to unlock the full potential of the quality, value or momentum factors.

Authors: Blitz, David and Hanauer, Matthias Xaver

Title: Settling the Size Matter

The usage of alternative data is now a main-stream topic in investment management and algorithmic trading. So let’s together explore the textual analysis of 10-K & 10-Q filings and analyze how these datasets could be used as a profitable part of investment portfolios. We invite you to read this short summarization of the research. Full version can be found on the SSRN.

Earnings announcement days are really important dates in a usual yearly corporate routine. The stock market usually reacts sharply on earnings announcement news and stocks on average earn statistically significant return excess of the market over the short window centred around the announcements. But how does the movement of stocks look before earnings announcement? The recent research paper written by Gao, Hu, and Zhang analyzes price action before and after earnings announcement and shows that a majority of the announcement month premium is realized during the pre-announcement period. Stocks with higher levels of uncertainty (stocks are sorted based on their option implied volatilities) experience larger pre-announcement returns and more uncertainty resolution during the pre-announcement period…

Authors: Gao, Chao and Hu, Grace Xing and Zhang, Xiaoyan.

Title: Uncertainty Resolution Before Earnings Announcements

The best course of action for every quant researcher is to try to fundamentally understand anomalies and explore their functioning besides the original scope of the academic research papers. The goal of this article was to look for inspiration and further explore the Skewness affect – the tendency of assets with the lowest skewness to outperform assets with the highest skewness. It seems that this anomaly is present not only in commodities but also in currencies, fixed income and equities. Trading strategy that exploits the effect of skewness in the multi-asset setting would earn an annual return of 7.67% when leveraged to the 15% volatility.

Some companies have relatively more of their value in near-term cash flow (for ex. General Motors Corporation). Others (for ex. Tesla), are growth stocks, with a greater proportion of their market value based on long-term expected future cash flow. It seems that coronavirus pandemic has hit mainly the first group, the “low equity duration” companies. A new academic research paper written by Dechow, Erhard, Sloan, and Soliman explains how the equity duration factor can be used to assess how are companies exposed to short-term unexpected macroeconomic events (like COVID-19 pandemic), and how equity duration sensitivity can also explain relative underperformance of value vs growth stocks during the last bear market.

Authors: Dechow, Patricia and Erhard, Ryan and Sloan, Richard G. and Soliman, Mark T.

Title: Implied Equity Duration: A Measure of Pandemic Shutdown Risk