Federal Open Market Committee meetings (aka FED meetings) have a significant influence on the number of different assets (see for example our article related to drift in equities during FED meetings). The main channel which FED uses to influence the US economy is the level of short term interest rates. Therefore, it’s not a surprise that FED meetings have influence also on long-term interest rates. But just how big? Bigger than most people think. We are presenting one interesting research paper written by Sebastian Hillenbrand, which shows that the whole secular decline in equity yields and long-term interest rates since 1980 was realized entirely in a 3-day window around FOMC meetings. Now, that’s called the influence …

Author: Hillenbrand

Title: The Secular Decline in Long-Term Yields around FOMC Meetings

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.

We present an interesting academic paper with a methodology that allows estimating VIX (volatility risk) since the year 1890 …

Authors: Manela, Moreira

Title: News Implied Volatility and Disaster Concerns

Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2382197

Abstract:

We construct a text-based measure of uncertainty starting in 1890 using front-page articles of the Wall Street Journal. News implied volatility (NVIX) peaks during stock market crashes, times of policy-related uncertainty, world wars and financial crises. In US post-war data, periods when NVIX is high are followed by periods of above average stock returns, even after controlling for contemporaneous and forward-looking measures of stock market volatility. News coverage related to wars and government policy explains most of the time variation in risk premia our measure identifies. Over the longer 1890-2009 sample that includes the Great Depression and two world wars, high NVIX predicts high future returns in normal times, and rises just before transitions into economic disasters. The evidence is consistent with recent theories emphasizing time variation in rare disaster risk as a source of aggregate asset prices fluctuations.

Notable quotations from the academic research paper:

"This paper aims to quantify this “spirit of the times”, which after the dust settles is forgotten, and only hard data remains to describe the period. Specifically, our goal is to measure people’s perception of uncertainty about the future, and to use this measurement to investigate what types of uncertainty drive aggregate stock market risk premia.

We start from the idea that time-variation in the topics covered by the business press is a good proxy for the evolution of investors’ concerns regarding these topics.

We estimate a news-based measure of uncertainty based on the co-movement between the front-page coverage of the Wall Street Journal and options-implied volatility (VIX). We call this measure News Implied Volatility, or NVIX for short. NVIX has two useful features that allow us to further our understanding of the relationship between uncertainty and expected returns:

(i) it has a long time-series, extending back to the last decade of the nineteen century, covering periods of large economic turmoil, wars, government policy changes, and crises of various sorts;

(ii) its variation is interpretable and provides insight into the origins of risk variation.

The first feature enables us to study how compensation for risks reflected in newspaper coverage has fluctuated over time, and the second feature allows us to identify which kinds of risk were important to investors.

We rely on machine learning techniques to uncover information from this rich and unique text dataset. Specifically, we estimate the relationship between option prices and the frequency of words using Support Vector Regression. The key advantage of this method over Ordinary Least Squares is its ability to deal with a large feature space. We find that NVIX predicts VIX well out-of-sample, with a root mean squared error of 7.48 percentage points (R2 = 0.19). When we replicate our methodology with realized volatility instead of VIX, we find that it works well even as we go decades back in time, suggesting newspaper word-choice is fairly stable over this period.

We study whether fluctuations in NVIX encode information about equity risk premia. We begin by focusing on the post-war period commonly studied in the literature for which high-quality stock market data is available. We find strong evidence that times of greater investor uncertainty are followed by times of above average stock market returns. A one standard deviation increase in NVIX predicts annualized excess returns higher by 3.3 percentage points over the next year and 2.9 percentage points annually over the next two years.

Interpretability, a key feature of the text-based approach, enables us to investigate what type of news drive the ability of NVIX to predict returns. We decompose the text into five categories plausibly related (to a varying degree) to disaster concerns: war, financial intermediation, government policy, stock markets, and natural disasters. We find that a large part of the variation in risk premia is related to wars (53%) and government policy (27%). A substantial part of the time-series variation in risk premia NVIX identifies is driven by concerns tightly related to the type of events discussed in the rare disasters literature."

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Despite the fact that the economic theory states that financial markets are efficient and investors are rational, a large amount of research is about anomalies, where the result is different from the theoretical expectation. At Quantpedia, we deal with anomalies in the financial markets and we have identified more than 500 attractive trading systems together with hundreds of related academic papers.

This article should be a case study of some strategies that are listed in our Screener, with an aim to present a possible usage of strategies in our database. Moreover, we have extended the backtesting period and we show that the strategies are still working and have not diminished. This blog also should serve as a case study how to use the Quantpedia’s database itself; therefore the choice of strategies was not obviously random and strategies were filtered by given criteria, however, every strategy is listed in the “free“ section, and therefore no subscription is needed.

Related to all major factor strategies (trend, momentum, value, carry, seasonality and low beta/volatility):

Authors: Baltussen, Swinkels, van Vliet

Title: Global Factor Premiums

Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3325720

Abstract:

We examine 24 global factor premiums across the main asset classes via replication and new-sample evidence spanning more than 200 years of data. Replication yields ambiguous evidence within a unified testing framework with methods that account for p-hacking. The new-sample evidence reveals that the large majority of global factors are strongly present under conservative p-hacking perspectives, with limited out-of-sample decay of the premiums. Further, utilizing our deep sample, we find global factor premiums to be not driven by market, downside, or macroeconomic risks. These results reveal strong global factor premiums that present a challenge to asset pricing theories.

Notable quotations from the academic research paper:

"In this paper we study global factors premiums over a long and wide sample spanning the recent 217 years across equity index (but not single securities), bond, currency, and commodity markets.

The first objective of this study is to robustly and rigorously examine these global factor premiums from the perspective of ‘p-hacking’.

We take as our starting point the main global return factors published in the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Financial Economics during the period 2012-2018: time-series momentum (henceforth ‘trend’), cross-sectional momentum (henceforth ‘momentum’), value, carry, return seasonality and betting-against-beta (henceforth ‘BAB’). We examine these global factors in four major asset classes: equity indices, government bonds, commodities and currencies, hence resulting in a total of 24 global return factors.4

We work from the idea that these published factor premiums could be influenced by p-hacking and that an extended sample period is useful for falsification or verification tests. Figure 1, Panel A summarizes the main results of these studies.

Shown are the reported Sharpe ratio’s in previous publications, as well as the 5% significance cutoff in the grey-colored dashed line. In general, the studies show evidence on the global factor premiums, with 14 of the 22 factors (return seasonality is not tested in bonds and currencies) displaying significant Sharpe ratio’s at the conventional 5% significance level.

Further, most of the studies have differences in, amongst others, testing methodologies, investment universes and sample periods, choices that introduce degrees of freedom to the researcher. To mitigate the impact of such degrees of freedom, we reexamine the global return factors using uniform choices on testing methodology and investment universe over their average sample period (1981-2011). Figure 1, Panel B shows the results of this replicating exercise. We find that Sharpe ratios are marginally lower, with 12 of the 24 factor premiums being significant at the conventional 5% level.

The second objective of this study is to provide rigorous new sample evidence on the global return factors. To this end, we construct a deep, largely uncovered historical global database on the global return factors in the four major asset classes. This data consists of pre-sample data spanning the period 1800- 1980, supplemented with post-sample data from 2012-2016, such that we have an extensive new sample to conduct further analyses. If the global return factors were unintentionally the result of p-hacking, we would expect them to disappear for this new sample period.

Our new sample findings reveal consistent and ubiquitous evidence for the large majority of global return factors. Figure 1, Panel C summarizes our main findings by depicting the historical Sharpe ratio’s in the new sample period. In terms of economic significance, the Sharpe ratios are substantial, with an average of 0.41. Remarkably, in contrast to most out-of-sample studies we see very limited ‘out-of-sample’ decay of factor premiums.

In terms of statistical significance and p-hacking perspectives, 19 of the 24 t-values are above 3.0,19 Bayesian p-values are below 5%, and the break-even prior odds generally need to be above 9,999 to have less than 5% probability that the null hypothesis is true."

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