Sentiment

If there were a Superbowl of Finance for equities, it’d definitely be FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) meetings. Investors and traders from around the world gather and make their decisions on the brink of releasing a statement and following the press conference. Shah, Paturi, and Chava (May 2023) contribute with a new cleaned, tokenized, and labeled open-source dataset for FOMC text analysis of various data categories (meeting minutes, speeches, and press conferences). They also propose a new sequence classification task to classify sentences into different monetary policy stances (hawkish, dovish, and neutral) and show the application of this task by generating a hawkish-dovish classification measure from the trained model that they later use in an interesting trading strategy.

Today’s article focuses on investigating long-short anomaly portfolio return predictability in international stock markets, which often undergo mispricing due to investors’ sentiment. A paper by Jiang, Fuwei et al. (Apr 2023), suggests using the AAIG (Global Anomaly Index), and it examines the ability of the aggregate anomaly index to predict future returns in 33 stock markets. While previous research finds that a high aggregate anomaly measure predicts a low return in the U.S. market, this study further demonstrates that the global component of AAI (aggregate anomaly indices) is the key that drives international return predictability and reveals that the global anomaly index is a strong and robust predictor of equity risk premiums not just in the U.S. market but also in international markets, both in- and out-of-sample, consistently delivering significant economic values.

If you’re a regular reader of our blogs (and we hope you are!), you would not miss that we like to touch macro-economic subjects. One of that never-fading topics is the role of gold as a crisis hedge. The probably most known commodity is a popular choice for a portion of the total portfolio, from small investors to central banks, for various reasons (be it diversification or hedging). So let’s not further delay it, and today we ask: Is gold really a safe haven?

In the last third installment, we will finish exploring the world of market timing strategies (see parts 1 & 2). We will focus on yield curve predictors and incorporate all three ideas (price-based, macro-economic, and yield curve predictors) into one final trading strategy that yields an annual return above that of the stock market while doubling its Sharpe ratio and reducing maximal drawdown by two thirds.

In this second installment in a series of three articles, we will continue with our goal to construct a market timing strategy that would sidestep the equity market during bear markets. A few days ago, we started with price-based market timing strategies. Today, we will focus on macroeconomic indicators and predictors derived from the movements in the commodity markets.

The recent surge in global inflation sent shock waves across financial markets and affected the complicated relationship between stocks and bonds. Today, we would like to present you with a review of two interesting papers, which provide both a deep and easy-to-understand examination of the correlation structure of those two main asset classes. The first paper reviews specifics in various parts of the world, and the second one summarizes known information about the macroeconomic drivers of the US stock-bond correlation.