Multifactor funds, which offer factor diversification neatly packaged in one product, have a rather short but poor track record; these funds have largely underperformed widely-available broad market funds. This article evaluates the performance of multifactor funds relative to two homemade factor...

Academics, practitioners, and investors at large typically have a preference for making decisions based on a single variable that is supposed to be maximized or minimized. This approach is usually appropriate but it may also be misleading. When selecting an optimal retirement strategy a retiree...

Volatility is the most widely-used measure of risk but its relevance is questionable in many settings. For long-term investors, short-term volatility is something they just have to live with and disregard as much as possible. Tail risks, however, are critical because, although rare by...

The negative relationship between stock market P/E ratios and government bond yields seems to have become conventional wisdom among practitioners. Both limited empirical evidence and a misleading suggestion that the model originated in the Fed are used to support the model's plausibility. This...

The negative relationship between market P/E ratios and government bond yields seems to have become conventional wisdom among practitioners. Both (limited) empirical evidence and a (misleading) suggestion that the model originated in the Fed are used to support the model's plausibility. The...

The assumption that daily stock returns are normally distributed has long been disputed by the data. In this article we test (and clearly reject) the normality assumption using time seriesof daily stock returns for thirteen European securities markets. More importantly, we fit to the data four...

The standard deviation, arguably the most widely-used measure of risk, suffers from at least two limitations. First, the number itself offers little insight; after all, what is the intuition behind the square root of the average quadratic deviation from the arithmetic mean return? Second,...

Beta as a measure of risk has been under fire for many years. Although practitioners still widely use the CAPM to estimate the cost of equity, they are aware of its problems and looking for alternatives. A possible alternative is to estimate the cost of equity based on the semideviation, a...

Do investors in the U.S. stock market obtain their long term returns smoothly and steadily over time, or is their long term performance largely determined by the return of just a few outliers? How likely are investors to successfully predict the best days to be in and out of the market? The...

Do investors obtain their long term returns smoothly and steadily over time, or is their long term performance largely determined by the return of just a few outliers? How likely are investors to successfully predict the best days to be in and out of the market? The evidence from 15...