Many private and institutional investors attempt to time the market and generate abnormal returns by periodically switching their portfolio allocations between the stock market and the cash market based on their return predictions. However, most academic studies emphasize that a successful...

Corporate insider trades predict idiosyncratic return skewness. CEO purchases are followed by an increase and CEO sales by a decrease in idiosyncratic skewness. The evidence suggests that this effect is driven by personal preferences rather than behavioral biases such as overconfidence. Our...

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)....

This paper examines the cross-sectional properties of stock return forecasts based on Fama-MacBeth regressions using all firms contained in the STOXX Europe 600 index during the September 1999-December 2018 period. Our estimation approach is strictly out-of-sample, mimicking an investor who...