This study examines whether the “Sell in May and Go Away” (or Halloween) trading strategy still offers an opportunity to earn abnormal returns. In contrast to prior studies, we consider sample periods during which adequate investment instruments were available for an effective implementation...

This study compares the performance of different rebalancing strategies under realistic market conditions by reporting statistical significance levels. Our analysis is based on historical data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany and comprises three different classes of...

The old and simple investment strategy “Sell in May and Go Away” (also referred to as the “Halloween effect”) enjoys an unbroken popularity. Recent studies suggest that the Halloween effect even strengthened rather than weakened since its first publication by Bouman and Jacobsen (2002)....

Portfolio insurance strategies are used on both the institutional and the retail side of the asset management industry. While standard utility theory struggles to provide an explanation, this study justifies the popularity of portfolio insurance strategies in a behavioral finance context. We run...

This study examines the empirical relationship between the volatility indices VDAX as well as VDAX-New and the stock market index DAX. Extending prior international evidence, we document a negative relationship between the implied volatility indexes and the stock market index for the German...

We find that stocks exhibiting high dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts not only underperform in the U.S. but also in some European countries. Investigating the abnormal returns generated by the dispersion strategy around the world for the 1990–2008 sample period, we observe that the...

Naïvely testing for accruals mispricing in 26 equity markets -- one market at a time -- we find statistical evidence of anomalous returns in some countries. However, some of these findings might well be spurious because of data snooping biases that arise when simultaneously testing several...

In this paper, we find that price and earnings momentum are pervasive features of international equity markets even when controlling for data-snooping biases. For Europe, we show price momentum to be subsumed by earnings momentum on an aggregate level. However, this rationale can hardly be...

We use a dynamic adjustment model and panel methodology to investigate the determinants of a time-varying optimal capital structure. Because firms may temporarily deviate from their optimal capital structure in the presence of adjustment costs, we also endogenize the adjustment process. In...

Stock returns in emerging markets are to some extent predictable on the basis of selected instrument variables. We show that local information is more important than global information to capture emerging stock market returns. This is an indication for at least partial segmentation of emerging...