We investigate an important question for institutional investors — namely, which hedge fund investing styles help to hedge against bad times? We define good versus bad times as (1) up and down equity market regimes derived from the 200-day moving average of the S&P 500 price index or (2)...

To answer this question, we develop new testing methods for identifying superior forecasting skills in settings with arbitrarily many forecasters, outcome variables, and time periods. Our methods allow us to address if any economists had superior forecasting skills for any variables or at any...

We construct an information factor (INFO) using the informed stock buying of corporate insiders and the informed selling of short sellers and option traders. INFO strongly predicts future stock returns -- a long-short portfolio formed on INFO earns monthly alphas of 1.24%, substantially...