The profitability of momentum trading strategies in the Irish equity market

We examine the profitability of momentum-based trading strategies in the Irish equity market between 1988 and 2007. We investigate a range of trading strategies over alternative backward-looking ranking periods and forward-looking holding horizons as well as for alternative size momentum portfolios. We find that returns to momentum-based strategies are highly non-normally distributed, giving rise to concern about the validity of inferences based on standard statistical tests of their abnormal performance. We therefore apply a bootstrap procedure to construct nonparametric p-values for the portfolio performance measures. Overall, we find little evidence that momentum-based trading strategies would have yielded an abnormal risk-adjusted return over the period. The Irish equity market appears to be quite efficient in this respect

Stocks and bonds: eggs in the same or different baskets. A cointegration analysis

The Johansen cointegration testing and estimation procedure is applied to examine the relationships among the stock markets, government bond markets and credit bond markets of the US, UK, Europe and Japan over the period 1985M1:2002M4. Asset class relationships are examined with returns denominated in dollars, sterling, euro and yen to determine whether long run diversification gains were achievable by international investors with these as base currencies. Cointegrating relations among currency hedged returns are also investigated. Cointegration findings, and by inference long run diversification opportunities, are found to be highly sensitive to the choice of currency in which returns are denominated and to whether currency risk is hedged, revealing the important role of exchange rates in international portfolio diversification

Liquidity risk and the performance of UK mutual funds

We examine the role of liquidity risk, both as a stock characteristic as well as systematic liquidity risk, in UK mutual fund performance for the first time. Using four alternative measures of stock liquidity we extract principal components across stocks in order to construct systematic or market liquidity factors. We find that on average UK mutual funds are tilted towards liquid stocks (except for small stock funds as might be expected) but that, counter-intuitively, liquidity as a stock characteristic is positively priced in the cross-section of fund performance. We find that systematic liquidity risk is positively priced in the cross-section of fund performance. Overall, our results reveal a strong role for stock liquidity level and systematic liquidity risk in fund performance evaluation models

Asset price effects arising from sports results and investor mood: the case of a homogenous fan base area

This paper contributes to the behavioural finance literature that examines the asset pricing impact of mood altering events such as sports results, sunshine levels, daylight hours, public holidays, temperature etc. Specifically, we investigate whether variations in investor mood arising from wins and losses in major sporting events have an impact on stock market returns. We examine the case of Ireland. Ireland is an interesting case because its people are passionate about sport, the domestic population is relatively homogenous (rather than divided) in terms of support for Irish competitors in international competition and domestic investors comprise a large proportion of owners of Irish stocks—all factors which suggest that if a mood effect exists it should show up in this case. Generally, we do not find a strong link between sport results and stock market returns. Initial results do suggest that in events of particularly high importance, such as the knock-out stages of major competitions, losses are associated with negative returns. However, on controlling for indirect economic effects of sporting wins and losses such as on tourism and travel we find the mood effect is no longer significant

Investment funds: What next?

Investment funds provide a low cost method of sharing in the rewards from capitalism. Recently “alternative investments” such as hedge funds have grown rapidly and the trading strategies open to hedge funds are now becoming available to mutual funds and even to ordinary retail investors. In this paper we analyze problems in assessing fund performance and the prospects for investment fund sectors. Choosing genuine outperformers among top funds requires a careful assessment of non-normality, order statistics and the possibility of false discoveries. The risk adjusted performance of the average hedge fund over the last 10-15 is actually not that impressive, although the “top” funds do appear to have statistically significant positive alphas

False discoveries in UK mutual fund performance

We use a multiple hypothesis testing framework to estimate the false discovery rate (FDR) amongst UK equity mutual funds. Using all funds, we find a relatively high FDR for the best funds of 32.8% (at a 5% significance level), which implies that only around 3.7% of all funds truly outperform their benchmarks. For the worst funds the FDR is relatively small at 7.6% which results in 22% of funds which truly underperform their benchmarks. For different investment styles, this pattern of very few genuine winner funds is repeated for all companies, small companies and equity income funds. Forming portfolios of funds recursively for which the FDR is controlled at a ‘acceptable’ value, produces no performance persistence for positive alpha funds and weak evidence of persistence for negative alpha funds

UK mutual fund performance: Skill or luck?

Using a comprehensive data set on (surviving and non-surviving) UK equity mutual funds, we use a cross-section bootstrap methodology to distinguish between ‘skill’ and ‘luck’ for individual funds. This methodology allows for non-normality in the idiosyncratic risk of the funds — a major issue when considering those funds which appear to be either very good or very bad performers, since these are the funds which investors are primarily interested in identifying. Our study points to the existence of stock picking ability among a relatively small number of top performing UK equity mutual funds (i.e. performance which is not solely due to good luck). At the negative end of the performance scale, our analysis strongly rejects the hypothesis that most poor performing funds are merely unlucky. Most of these funds demonstrate ‘bad skill’. Recursive estimation and Kalman ‘smoothed’ coefficients indicate temporal stability in the ex-post performance alpha's of winner and loser portfolios. We also find performance persistence amongst loser but not amongst winner funds

The conditional pricing of systematic and idiosyncratic risk in the UK equity market

We test whether firm idiosyncratic risk is priced in a large cross-section of U.K. stocks. A distinguishing feature of our paper is that our tests allow for a conditional relationship between systematic risk (beta) and returns, i.e., conditional on whether the excess market return is positive or negative. We find strong evidence in support of a conditional beta/return relationship which in turn reveals conditionality in the pricing of idiosyncratic risk. We find that idiosyncratic volatility is significantly negatively priced in stock returns in down-markets. Although perhaps initially counter-intuitive, we describe the theoretical support for such a finding in the literature. Our results also reveal some role for liquidity, size and momentum risk but not value risk in explaining the cross-section of returns

Liquidity commonality and pricing in UK equities

We investigate the pricing of systematic liquidity risk in UK equities using a large sample of daily data. Employing four alternative measures of liquidity we first find strong evidence of commonality in liquidity across stocks. We apply asymptotic principal component analysis (PCA) on the sample of stocks to extract market or systematic liquidity factors. Previous research on systematic liquidity risk, estimated using PCA, is focused on the US, which has very different market structures to the UK. Our pricing results indicate that systematic liquidity risk is positively priced in the cross-section of stocks, specifically for the quoted spread liquidity measure. These findings around the pricing of systematic liquidity risk are not affected by the level of individual stock liquidity as a risk characteristic. However, counter-intuitively, we find that the latter is negatively priced in the cross-section of stocks, confirming earlier research