Momentum

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.

Top Ten Blog Posts on Quantpedia in 2025

2.January 2026

One year is again behind us (in this case, it was 2025), and we are all a little older (and hopefully richer and/or wiser). Turn-of-the-year period is usually an excellent time for a short recap. Over the past 12 months, we have kept our pace and published nearly 70 short analyses of academic papers and our own research articles. So let’s summarize 10 of them, which were the most popular (based on the Google Analytics ranking). The top 10 is diverse, as usual; once again, we hope that you may find something you have not read yet …

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Leveraged ETFs in Asset Allocation: Opportunity or Trap?

16.November 2025

In this article, we explore whether it makes sense to incorporate leveraged ETFs into static and dynamic long-only asset allocation strategies. Leveraged ETFs promise amplified exposure to the underlying asset, offering the potential for significantly higher returns during favorable market conditions. However, this comes at the cost of much higher volatility, path-dependency, and the well-known issue of volatility decay, which can lead to substantial underperformance over longer periods. Our objective is to examine if — and how — leveraged ETFs can be systematically integrated into portfolio construction so that their benefits can be captured while mitigating their inherent risks.

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How to Design a Simple Multi-Timeframe Trend Strategy on Bitcoin

13.November 2025

Bitcoin is one of the most widely discussed financial assets of the modern era. Since its inception, it has evolved from a niche digital experiment into a globally recognized investment instrument with institutional adoption and billions in daily trading volume. Despite its inherent volatility, Bitcoin has demonstrated a strong long-term growth trajectory, making it an attractive candidate for trend-based and momentum-oriented trading strategies. In this study, we apply concepts from technical analysis to construct and refine a trend-following strategy for Bitcoin, progressing step by step from a simple MACD setup toward an improved multi-timeframe model.

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Cryptocurrency as an Investable Asset Class – 10 Lessons

24.October 2025

Cryptocurrencies have matured from experimental curiosities into a viable investable asset class whose return-generation and risk characteristics merit treatment within empirical asset pricing. A recent paper by Nicola Borri, Yukun Liu, Aleh Tsyvinski, Xi Wu summarizes ten facts from the literature that show cryptocurrencies share important similarities with traditional markets—comparable risk-adjusted performance and a small set of cross-sectional factors—while retaining distinctive features such as frequent large jumps and price signals embedded in blockchain data. Key themes include portfolio diversification, factor structure, market microstructure, and the evolving role of regulation and derivatives in shaping market discovery and stability.

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Can Technology Sector Leadership Be Systematically Exploited?

16.October 2025

The U.S. equity market has periodically been dominated by a few technology-driven stocks, most recently the so-called “Magnificent Seven.” Historically, similar dominance occurred during the Nifty Fifty era in the 1960s–1970s and the dot-com boom in the 1990s. These periods of concentrated leadership often led to temporary outperformance, but systematically capturing such gains has proven challenging. Our study investigates the potential to exploit technology sector dominance using momentum-based strategies across Fama–French 12 industry portfolios, analyzing whether long-only, long-short, and rolling-basis approaches can generate persistent alpha, and assessing the limitations of simple timing methods.

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Cross-Sectional and Dollar Components of Currency Risk Premia

26.September 2025

Currency strategies often appear simple on the surface – go long high-yielding currencies, short low-yielding ones, or take a position on the U.S. dollar. But these trades actually mix two distinct components: a Dollar component, which bets on broad movements of the U.S. dollar against all others, and a Cross-Sectional (CS) component, which exploits relative differences across countries. The question is, which of these components really drives currency risk premia? A new paper by Vahid Rostamkhani tackles this long-standing question by decomposing the predictive power of eleven macroeconomic fundamentals—such as interest rates, inflation, unemployment, and fiscal variables—into these two components across almost a century of data (1926-2023). This approach directly tests whether it is more rewarding to time the dollar itself or to focus on cross-country fundamental spreads.

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