This paper shows that the puzzling negative cross-sectional relation between dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts and future stock returns may be explained by financial distress, as proxied by credit rating downgrades. Focusing on a sample of firms rated by Standard & Poor's (S&P), we show...

Low credit risk firms realize higher returns than high credit risk firms. This is puzzling because investors seem to pay a premium for bearing credit risk. The credit risk effect manifests itself due to the poor performance of low-rated stocks (which account for 4.2% of total market...

This paper documents a strong relationship between short-run reversals and stock illiquidity, even after controlling for trading volume. The largest reversals and the potential contrarian trading strategy profits occur in high turnover, low liquidity stocks, as the price pressures caused by...

This article proposes a trading-based explanation for the asymmetric effect in daily volatility of individual stock returns. Previous studies propose two major hypotheses for this phenomenon: leverage effect and time-varying expected returns. However, leverage has no impact on asymmetric...

This paper establishes a robust link between momentum and credit rating. Momentum profitability is large and significant among low-grade firms, but it is nonexistent among high-grade firms. The momentum payoffs documented in the literature are generated by low-grade firms that account for less...

This paper explores commonalities across asset pricing anomalies. In particular, we assess implications of financial distress for the profitability of anomaly-based trading strategies. Strategies based on price momentum, earnings momentum, credit risk, dispersion, idiosyncratic volatility, and...

This paper analyzes the performance of portfolio strategies that invest in noload, open-end U.S. domestic equity mutual funds, incorporating predictability in (i) manager skills, (ii) fund risk-loadings, and (iii) benchmark returns. Predictability in manager skills is found to be the dominant...