Momentum is the tendency of investments to persist in their performance. Assets that perform well over a 3 to 12 month period tend to continue to perform well into the future. The momentum effect of Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) is one of the strongest and most pervasive financial phenomena. Momentum investment strategies have been mostly applied to equities (see momentum in equities), however there is large evidence documenting momentum across different asset classes. Typical strategy consists of a universe of major indices on equity, bonds, real estate and commodities. The aim is to keep long only portfolio where an index with positive past 12 month returns is bought and negative returns sold. A well-known example of trend following momentum strategy is from Faber (2007). He creates 10 month moving average for which assets are sold and bought every month based on price being above or below the moving average. Using a 100 years of data, Faber claims to outperform the market with the mean return of 10.18% , 11.97 % volatility and max draw-down of 50.29%, compared to S&P 500 return of 9.32%, volatility of 17.87% and max draw-down of 83.46%.

In general, we distinguish between absolute and relative momentum. Absolute momentum is captured by trend following strategies that adjusts weights of assets based on past returns such as relative level of current prices compared to moving averages. Relative or cross sectional momentum, on the other hand, use long and short positions applied to both the long and short side of a market simultaneously. It makes little difference whether the studied markets go up or down, since short momentum positions hedge long ones, and vice versa. When looking only at long side momentum, however, it is desirable to be long only when both absolute and relative momentum are positive, since long-only momentum results are highly regime dependent. In order to increase performance, the simple momentum strategy is expanded to capture both relative and absolute momentum creating a long short portfolio.

Various extensions to the simple strategies shown above have been suggested. For example we can deploy mean-variance optimisation to re-weight our assets to minimise the risk given return. Moreover, we can diversify the strategy by restricting the weights to different asset classes and risk factors as well as adding various risk management practices to decrease leverage during heightened volatility periods. Furthermore, taking into account the cyclicality and idiosyncratic momentum of various sub-indices to Faber’s original asset classes produces even stronger improvements to risk-adjusted returns. Unfortunately, cross-sectional strategies use high number of stocks resulting in high trading costs. Luckily, it has been found that using sectors and indices instead of individual stocks still earns similar momentum returns while having lower trading costs.

Numerous empirical studies report on benefits of extending momentum strategy across asset classes (see Rouwenhorst 1998, Blake 1999, Griffin, Ji, and Martin 2003, Gorton, Hayashi, and Rouwenhorst 2008, Asness, Moskowitz, and Pedersen 2009). For example, including commodities in a momentum strategy can achieve better diversification and protection from inflation while having equity like returns (Erb and Harvey, 2006). Foreign exchange is another asset class with published momentum effects. Okunev and White (2003) find the well-documented profitability of momentum strategies with equities to hold for currencies throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. Contrary to already mentioned asset classes, bond returns have generally not displayed momentum. However, some later evidence suggests that assorting bonds with volatility adjusted returns leads to observation of momentum. Using 68,914 individual investment-grade and high-yield bonds, Jostova et al. (2013) find strong evidence of momentum profitability in US corporate bonds over the period from 1973 to 2008. Past six-month winners outperform past six-month losers by 61 basis points per month over a six-month holding period. Last but not least, momentum has been documented in real estate with a cross-sectional momentum buy/sell strategy significantly reducing volatility and drawdown of a long only REIT fund.

An often cited benefit of momentum strategies is their sustainable performance attributed to a true anomaly rather than skewedness in the return probability distribution that is cited to be responsible for value and carry strategy. Reasons explaining the momentum anomaly include analyst coverage, analyst forecast dispersion, illiquidity, price level, age, size, credit rating, return chasing and confirmation bias, market-to-book, turnover and others.

Three Methods to Fix Momentum Crashes

12.November 2019

Everyone who lived during the 2007 and 2009 crisis knows what the biggest weakness of the equity momentum strategy was. It was right during the spring of 2009 when the financial markets were on its inflection point when the momentum strategy crashed. Right after that inflection point, stocks which were the biggest losers during the previous year performed exceptionally well and caused strong under-performance of classical long-short momentum strategy. How can we prevent this situation from happening again? That’s the topic of our favorite new recent study written by Matthias Hanauer and Steffen Windmueller. They analyze three momentum risk management techniques – idiosyncratic momentum, constant volatility-scaling, and dynamic scaling, to find the remedy for momentum crashes. It’s our recommended read for this week for equity long-short managers …

Authors: Matthias Hanauer and Steffen Windmueller

Title: Enhanced Momentum Strategies

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Impact of Currency Volatility on Momentum and Carry Factors

5.November 2019

What is the impact of volatility (and changes in volatility) on popular Currency Momentum and Currency Carry strategies? That’s the topic of recent academic study written by Duc Hong Hoang, which decomposes foreign exchange volatility into two components, namely, secular (long-term) and transitory or mean-reverting (short-term) components. Long term component captures business cycle effects, while short term volatility usually represents funding tightness or shocks. Carry trade strategy is linked (and therefore partially predictable) to long-run volatility while momentum reacts mainly to short-run risks.

Author: Hoang

Title: Long Run and Short Run Risk Premium in Currency Market

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Calendar / Seasonal Trading and Momentum Factor

29.October 2019

We are continuing in our short series of articles about calendar / seasonal trading. The main focus of this paper is to show that the well-working calendar / seasonal anomalies can be refined. The aim is to find the right factors and find a way how to combine them in a search for profit from the practitioner’s point of view. Based on our previous research, calendar anomalies are profitable, but there is a possible way how to enhance their performance. This can be done by employing momentum strategies. By assigning a weight to assets from a diversified set according to their momentum value, it is possible to find a profitable asset during various global market conditions. Moreover, a trend factor is used to ensure that when market conditions are not favorable, the strategy will not trade. Such addition is a typical approach used for reducing maximal draw-downs. Finally, since this paper is written from the practitioner’s point of view, we are assuming some model transaction costs and examine the strategy in their presence.

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Commodity Futures Risk Premium – Historical Analysis

17.October 2019

We at Quantpedia absolutely love long-term studies, and academic research paper written by Bhardwaj, Janardanan, and Rouwenhorst is really exceptional. There are a lot of studies covering a long history of equity and bond markets. But futures markets are not covered so well, and that’s the reason why is this paper so valuable. An additional plus is that study covers also delisted contracts, which makes the study’s data quality even better. Quantpedia’s recommended read to anyone interested in asset allocation into commodities …

Authors: Bhardwaj, Janardanan and Rouwenhorst

Title: The Commodity Futures Risk Premium: 1871–2018

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Momentum Explains a Bunch Of Equity Factors

10.October 2019

Financial academics have described so many equity factors that the whole universe of them is sometimes called “factor zoo”. Therefore, it is no surprise that there is a quest within an academic community to bring some order into this chaos. An interesting research paper written by Favilukis and Zhang suggests explaining a lot of equity factors with momentum anomaly. They show that very often, up to 50% of the equity factor returns can be linked to returns of momentum strategy. This link is especially prevalent in short legs of equity factors.

Authors: Favilukis, Zhang

Title: One Anomaly to Explain Them All

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Three New Insights from Academic Research Related to Equity Momentum Strategy

4.August 2019

What are the main insights?

– The momentum spread (the difference of the formation-period recent 6-month returns between winners and losers) negatively predicts future momentum profit in the long-term (but not in the following month), the negative predictability is mainly driven by the old momentum spread (old momentum stocks are based on whether a stock has been identified as a momentum stock for more than three months)

– The momentum profits based on total stock returns can be decomposed into three components: a long-term average alpha component that reverses, a stock beta component that accounts for the dynamic market exposure (and momentum crash risk), and a residual return component that drives the momentum effect (and subsumes total-return momentum)

– The profitability and the optimal combination of ranking and holding periods of momentum strategies for a sample of Core and Peripheral European equity markets the profitability vary across markets

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