"Traditional business cycle indicators do not capture much of the cyclical variation in factor returns. Major turning points seem to be caused by changes in sentiment instead. We infer a Quant Cycle directly from factor returns."
2/ "Altogether, the 1/N mix of factors has virtually the same return during expansions and recessions.
"The simple 1/N mix is again remarkably stable with respect to inflationary and non-inflationary periods, with practically the same return in both regimes."
3/ "Factor returns appear to be solid regardless of the ISM business outlook.
"The investor sentiment index appears to be more effective. However, computing investor sentiment in real time is not easy, given the required inputs, and the resulting scores can be counterintuitive."
4/ "We determine the quant cycle by qualitatively identifying peaks and troughs that correspond to bull and bear markets in factor returns. Our approach is part art and part science.
"We focus more on volatile factors, such as value & momentum, than on factors such as quality."
5/ "About once every ten years, the normal stage is interrupted by growth rallies or value crashes that last about two years, and which are in turn followed by reversals."
6/ "Exhibit 13 shows the (unconditional) probability of transitioning from one stage to another over a 12-month period.
"Some show up with a zero estimated probability as they have not occurred over our sample period, but of course, this does not mean that they are impossible."
7/ "By going back further in time, in particular to the Great Depression, we can uncover more value crashes and bull reversals.
"The apparent regularity observed post-1963 and the transition probabilities estimated over that period may not be representative for the long run."
8/ "The performance of the alternative asset pricing factors over the quant cycle is consistent with their correlations with our base-case factors.
"Exhibit 17 gives a qualitative summary of our main findings."
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1/ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (Michael Lewis)
"Baseball was at the center of a story about the possibilities—and limits—of reason. It showed how an unscientific culture responds (or fails to respond) to the scientific method." (p. xiv)
2/ "A small group of undervalued professional players & executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises.
"How did one of the poorest teams, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?" (p. xi)
3/ "Hitting statistics were abundant & had, for James, the powers of language. They were, in his Teutonic coinage, 'imagenumbers.' Literary material. When you read them, they called to mind pictures. He wrote... 'To get 191 hits in a season demands (or seems to) a consistency...
3/ "Value, momentum & defensive/quality applied to US individual stocks has a t-stat of 10.8. Data mining would take nearly a trillion random trials to find this.
"Applying those factors (+carry) across markets and asset classes gets a t-stat of >14."
2/ "The model's four terms describe different life stages for an individual who marries during the sample period. The intercept reflects the average life satisfaction of individuals in the baseline period [all noncohabiting years that are at least one year before marriage]."
3/ " 'How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?' Responses are ranked on a scale from 0 (completely dissatisfied) to 10 (completely satisfied).
"We center life satisfaction scores around the annual mean of each population subsample in the original population."
1/ Short-sightedness, rates moves and a potential boost for value (Hanauer, Baltussen, Blitz, Schneider)
…
* Value spread remains wide
* Relationship between value and rates is not structural
* Extrapolative growth forecasts drive the value premium
… robeco.com/en-int/insight…
2/ "The valuation gap between cheap and expensive stocks remains extremely wide. This signals the potential for attractive returns going forward."
3/ "We observe a robust negative relationship between value returns and changes in the value spread.
"The intercept of ≈10% can be interpreted as a cleaner estimate of the value premium, given that it is purged of the time-varying effects of multiple expansions & compressions."