Today, we will look closer into the hood of life expectancy of investment strategies and try to answer the critical question on which many, in some sense, if not all, trading strategies are built: what happens with anomalies after their discovery? The paper’s authors, with the sweet, simple name Anomaly Discovery and Arbitrage Trading, analyze a stylized model of anomaly discovery, which has implications for both asset prices and arbitrageurs’ trading. Their original research produced an arbitrageur-based asset pricing model that shows that discovering an anomaly reduces the correlation between the returns of its long- and short-leg portfolios: HFs (professional arbitrageurs) use to increase (unwind) such trades when their wealth increases (decreases), further supporting the view that the discovery effects work through arbitrage trading. This effect is more substantial when arbitrageurs’ wealth is more volatile.

The topic of Smart-Beta is widely recognized, and we cover, monitor, and inform about its developments. The analyzed piece is about the importance of the correct rebalancing strategy and is kindly provided by Research Affiliates. According to a recent research article, investors should re-consider rebalancing with turnover constraint only those stocks that have the strongest signal. Prioritizing trades in stocks that are the farthest removed from the portfolio selection threshold is likely to minimize the expected need for additional trading.

The commodity momentum strategy is a crucial driving force behind Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) strategies, as it capitalizes on the persistence of price trends in various commodity markets. By identifying and exploiting these trends, CTAs can achieve robust returns and diversification benefits. In their new paper, John Hua FAN and Xiao QIAO (February 2023) present their perspective and understanding of cross-country and cross-sector influences on the behavior of commodity momentum beyond established commodity fundamentals focusing on U.S. and China markets.

Continuing our research of different factor allocations and models, we will look at the evergreen momentum effect closer. Cakici, Fieberg, Metko, and Zaremba’s (January 2023) paper contributes to the never-ending debate of the chicken-or-egg problem of what comes first: Does the stock price momentum originate from the factor momentum? The study reexamined the relationship between the factor and price momentum on an extensive sample of 95 years of data from 51 countries. And what are the main takeaways? Let’s find out …

Today, we will evaluate some specifics that are akin to the now second-largest market in the world – China. The abundance of “shell companies” creates a problem when researchers try to uncover sources of alpha in the Chinese market. We present recent research by Zhiyong Li and Xiao Rao (2022) that proposes a new alternative filter, which excludes the stocks with a high estimated shell probability when constructing equity factor models.

Arbitrage is a central concept in finance. It is defined as simultaneous long and short positions in similar assets to exploit mispricing. Hedge funds experienced fast growth over the past three decades, as real-world arbitrageurs as a group. As they increasingly influence the financial market, it is important to understand the economic drivers of hedge fund returns. Therefore we would like to present a paper dealing with the development of a parsimonious factor model, based on anomalies, to explain hedge fund returns.