In our view, the Efficient Market Hypothesis isn’t true, but it is close to being true. It is very hard to beat the market. In any competition it pays to analyze the opponent.  So, to beat the market you need to know the market’s weaknesses. Where are some niches that you can possibly exploit? […]

One of the first contributions of modern finance was to categorize returns into alpha and beta. Loosely speaking, beta returns were those that could be passively replicated with a broad market position, and alpha was excess returns above this. That was 60 years ago. Since then, the idea has been extended into “smart beta”, where […]

Most things that seem too good to be true are actually not true. This applies particularly to the markets where making money is hard and there are plenty of snake oil salesmen who will tell you otherwise. So it is perfectly sensible to be skeptical about something as promising as the Halloween Effect. In particular, does it […]

The idea of “sell in May and go away” isn’t new. Sometimes called the Halloween effect, the fact that equity markets do better in the winter months is one of the most well tested in finance. The effect is persistent, large and statistically significant. This is valuable information for investors. Even better is that a […]