1/ Trend Factor: Any Economic Gains from Using Information over Investment Horizons? (Han, Zhou, Zhu)

"A trend factor using multiple time lengths outperforms ST reversal, momentum, and LT reversal, which are based on the three price trends separately."

https://t.co/udkvsdw2Lz

2/ This resembles combining multiple measures of ST reversal, momentum, and LT reversal (forecasts determined by walking forward rather than using signs from the full sample).

Unlike normal moving average signals, these are *cross-sectional.* More below:
https://t.co/wkIFLg9jtK
3/ Unsurprisingly, the Trend factor formed by this approach outperforms benchmarks in terms of both Sharpe ratio and tail metrics. It's combining momentum with two factors that are negatively correlated to it AND using multiple specifications.

More here:
https://t.co/x8Tloz3iyL
4/ "Average return and volatility of the trend factor are both higher in recession periods. However, the Sharpe ratio is virtually the same.

"Interestingly, all of the factors still have positive average returns.

"Momentum experiences the greatest increase in volatility."
5/ "In terms of maximum drawdown and the Calmar ratio, the trend factor performs the best.

"The trend factor is correlated with the short-term reversal factor (35%), long-term reversal factor (14%), and the market (20%) but is virtually uncorrelated with the momentum factor."
6/ "The trend factor has a higher return during recessions, while momentum earns a small positive return b/c the short leg is a bit more negative than the long leg. Similar conclusions hold for expansions. This is why the two factors are not correlated over the entire sample."
7/ "The trend factor outperforms the momentum factor not only in terms of average returns, but also in terms of downside risks during months when the momentum factor performs poorly."
8/ "The hypothesis is strongly rejected that the trend factor is inside the mean-variance frontier of the short-term reversal, momentum, and long-term reversal factors for all three periods."
9/ "Overall, the trend factor, which utilizes price information across all the investment horizons, seems to place more emphasis on short-term price patterns than on the intermediate and long-term ones."
10/ Table 9: "While the market beta and SMB beta are U-shaped, the HML beta is hump-shaped across the quintiles. Hence, the trend factor has a small loading on the market and insignificant SMB and HML betas in the Fama-French three factor model."
11/ "The results suggest that small stocks and low priced stocks are more trending. This may be intuitively true: large stocks have more analyst following and more investors, and hence more information transparency and faster price movements to reflect available information."
12/ "A certain smoothing of the betas is necessary to maintain the out-of-sample performance of the trend factor.

"The betas do change substantially over time, varying from positive values to negative ones."
13/ "Performance decreases as the market size increases. However, even for the largest stocks, the superior performance of the High-Low spread portfolio is stat. & economically significant.

"Performance remains largely unchanged after controlling for other firm characteristics."
14/ "ER12trd has a significant and positive coefficient, indicating that the trend signals can predict future cross section returns independent of size and B/M. This is consistent with Table 11.

"Similar results are obtained when other variables are added to the regression."
15/ "It is not an easy matter to short all the stocks in the short leg.

"We have to have detailed information on which stocks can be shorted and then estimate the costs. While our evaluation based on the BETCs shows profitability potential, it is limited in scope."
16/ "The performance of the trend factor is not driven by a few outliers but is remarkably stable over time.

"Our trend factor passes the higher bar given in Harvey, Liu, and Zhu (2016) easily with a t-statistic of 13.6 (the momentum has a value of 6.04)."
17/ "The trend factor is clearly valid internationally, yielding the best performance among all the three factors and the local market indexes."
18/ "Table 15 reports the performance of the trend forecasts under different levels of information uncertainty.

"The Fama-French alphas increases as information uncertainty increases."
19/ "The trend factor performs better in explaining the industry returns than the momentum factor.

"The trend factor improves performance in terms of explaining the cross-section returns of the six size and book-to-market portfolios."
20/ "While the momentum factor together with the CAPM is far from sufficient in explaining the hedge fund returns, the trend factor performs still slightly better than the momentum factor in that task."
21/ "While our methodology here is focused on using price trends across investment horizons, it can also be applied to examine other economic fundamentals, such as firm earnings, profitability, growth, and investment patterns, over short and long terms."
22/ Related research:

Industry Long-Term Return Reversal
https://t.co/fuR5VsLB7l

More from Economy

The argument for deficits & debt raising interest rates in the US is not increased credit risk, it is that interest rates are a function of economic fundamentals, flows & policy. Deficits/debt change those.

I can't tell if I'm agreeing or disagreeing with @jc_econ.


Increasing government spending or reducing taxes increases demand (or reduces saving). This raises the price of loanable funds or the interest rate.

In a dynamic context, more demand means a stronger economy, the central bank raises interest rates sooner, and long rates rise.

(As an aside, we are not close to the United States needing to worry about credit risk and the risks are more overstated than understated in most other advanced economies too. But credit risk is not always & everywhere irrelevant, just look at the UK in 1976 or Canada in 1994.)

Interest rates have fallen over the last 20 yrs while debt has risen. This does not necessarily mean that debt rising causes interest rates to fall. It could also mean that other things have happened at he same time that pushed down interest rates more than debt pushed them up.

The suspects for these "other things" include slower productivity growth, slower popln growth, higher inequality, less investment, etc. All of which either increase the supply of saving or reduce the demand for investment, reducing the equilibrium interest rate.

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Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details):
https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.
The UN just voted to condemn Israel 9 times, and the rest of the world 0.

View the resolutions and voting results here:

The resolution titled "The occupied Syrian Golan," which condemns Israel for "repressive measures" against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights, was adopted by a vote of 151 - 2 - 14.

Israel and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/HoO7oz0dwr


The resolution titled "Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people..." was adopted by a vote of 153 - 6 - 9.

Australia, Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/1Ntpi7Vqab


The resolution titled "Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan" was adopted by a vote of 153 – 5 – 10.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/REumYgyRuF


The resolution titled "Applicability of the Geneva Convention... to the
Occupied Palestinian Territory..." was adopted by a vote of 154 - 5 - 8.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/xDAeS9K1kW