The central question addressed in this note is whether it is better to sell (and re-purchase) appreciated assets now and pay today's long-term capital gains tax rate, or wait to realize gains in the future and pay a likely higher capital gains tax rate. The authors argue that a framework based...

For US investors, international equity exposure has never been so readily available at such a low cost. Nonetheless, surveys indicate US investors typically allocate 80–85% of their equity holdings to US equities, much higher than their proportion of global market value. In this note we...

Home Bias refers to the tendency to invest more heavily in one's domestic equity market than global market-value proportions would suggest. Whether or not home-biased investing makes sense, the fact is that people in pretty much every country do it. This article addresses the question of whether...

There has been considerable research into dynamic global tactical asset allocation (GTAA) strategies driven by simple measures of Valuation and Momentum applied to a baseline balanced portfolio of equities and fixed income (see Blitz and van Vliet 2008, Wang and Kochard 2011, Gnedenko and Yelnik...

The longest bull market in US stock market history is over. Uncertainty over the public health and economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic will keep markets extremely volatile, making it likely we'll touch a wide range of price levels in the months ahead. Amidst such uncertainty, it's a...

Understanding the origins of wealth inequality is critical in the debate over what, if anything, to do about it. In this note, we propose a simple model which is still rich enough to reproduce observed patterns of wealth inequality. We call it the Concentrated Asset Betting (CAB) model. A key...

With 30% of the world's investment grade sovereign bonds trading at sub-zero yields, there is a growing acceptance that negative interest rates are the 'new normal.' Even very low probabilities of sustained negative interest rates in the future leads to incredibly high Expected Values for...

This note describes the background of Factor investing in its Smart Beta form, and discusses the reasons Factor investing has become a popular investing style. We also discuss a number of reasons for skepticism regarding forward-looking expected returns

Continuously rebalanced long-short trades are similar to highly levered trades in that their PNL profile depends not only on the final distribution of return, but also on the realized co-variance structure of the asset pair. It's easily possible for both orientations of a rebalanced long-short...