The fundamental value trap
Fundamental value seems like a straightforward investment approach. One simply looks for assets that are “cheap” or “expensive” relative to their rationally expected risk-adjusted...
Debt-weighted exchange rates
Trade-weighted exchange rates help assessing the impact of past currency depreciation on economic growth through the external trade channel. Debt-weighted exchange rates help assessing...
Critical transitions in financial markets
Critical transitions in financial markets are shifts in prices and operational structure to a new equilibrium after reaching a tipping point. “Complexity theory” helps...
Understanding negative inflation risk premia
Inflation risk premia in the U.S. and the euro area have disappeared or even turned negative since the great financial crisis, according to various...
Term premia and macro factors
The fixed income term premium is the difference between the yield of a longer-maturity bond and the average expected risk-free short-term rate for that...
Seasonal effects in commodity futures curves
Seasonal fluctuations are evident for many commodity prices. However, their exact size can be quite uncertain. Hence, seasons affect commodity futures curves in two...
Inflation: risk without premium
Historically, securities that lose value as inflation increases have paid a sizable risk premium. However, there is evidence that inflation risk premia have vanished...
Improving the information value of dividend yields
Marco Dion, Viquar Shaikh and colleagues at J.P. Morgan Cazenove illustrate how the information value of equity dividend yield can be enhanced. Their measure...
The relation between value and momentum strategies
Simple value and momentum strategies often end up with opposite market positions. One strategy succeeds when the other fails. There are two plausible reasons...
The concept of “real financial exchange rates”
A Bundesbank paper proposes a new type of real exchange rate index. Rather than measuring the competitiveness of goods markets, this “real financial exchange...
RECENT ARTICLES
Estimating the positioning of trend followers
There is a simple method of approximating trend follower positioning in real-time and without lag. It is based on normalized returns in liquid futures...
Forecasting energy markets with macro data
Recent academic papers illustrate how macroeconomic data support predictions of energy market flows and prices. Valid macro indicators include shipping costs, industrial production measures,...
Fundamental trend following
Fundamental trend following uses moving averages of past fundamental data, such as valuation metrics or economic indicators, to predict future fundamentals, analogously to the...