Asset pricing asks the field’s central question — why do some assets earn higher returns than others — and factor investing is its practical export. This hub collects the cross-sectional literature: momentum, value, carry, quality, low-volatility, the factor-zoo debates, and machine-learning approaches to the cross-section of expected returns.
The elephant in this literature is replication decay. Documented anomalies shrink dramatically after publication, and a large fraction fail replication once you correct for data mining across hundreds of tested signals. That makes publication date and multiple-testing correction the two most informative fields in any factor paper: work that applies higher t-statistic thresholds, or tests on post-publication and international samples, deserves far more weight than a fresh anomaly with a 1990-2015 US backtest. The rigor ranking below tends to surface exactly those papers.
Related hubs: Portfolio Optimization, Machine Learning for Forecasting, Fixed Income & Rates.
Many papers in the empirical finance literature implement tests of asset pricing models either via Fama-French time-series regressions or via Fama-Macbeth cros
Counterintuitively, the S&P 500 Index rose between January 1, 2022, and December 29, 2023, while exchange-traded funds (ETFs) seeking to deliver 2x and 3x daily returns of the index delivered substantially negative returns. Roughly two-thirds of the difference between the returns of the index and th
We estimate risk premia in the cross-section of cryptocurrency returns using the Giglio-Xiu (2021) three-pass approach, allowing for omitted latent factors alongside observed stock-market and crypto-market factors. Using weekly data on a broad universe of large cryptocurrencies, we find that crypto
The study examines whether fama-french equity factors can effectively explain the idiosyncratic risk and return characteristics of Bitcoin. By incorporating Fama-french factors, the explanatory power of these factors on Bitcoin’s excess returns over various moving average periods is tested through a
Stress testing refers to the application of adverse financial or macroeconomic scenarios to a portfolio. For this purpose, financial or macroeconomic risk factors are linked with asset returns, typically via a factor model. We expand the range of risk factors by adapting dimension-reduction techniqu
This paper is the first study to examine the time instability of the APT in the Japanese stock market. In particular, we measure how changes in each risk factor affect the stock risk premiums to investigate the validity of the APT over time, applying the rolling window method to Fama and MacBeth’s (
Shallow models are special cases of deep models, and deep models theoretically have the potential to outperform the shallow ones. However, the existing empirical asset pricing literature provides strong benchmarks for shallow models. Residual learning allows neural network models in asset pricing to
Quantitative trading strategies rely on accurately ranking stocks to identify profitable investments. Effective portfolio management requires models that can reliably order future stock returns. Transformer models are promising for understanding financial time series, but how different training loss
Modern economic systems face unprecedented socioeconomic challenges, making systemic resilience and effective liquidity flow management essential. Traditional models such as CAPM, VaR, and GARCH often fail to reflect real market fluctuations and extreme events. This study develops and validates an i
This report presents a systematic market-neutral, multi-factor investment strategy for New York Stock Exchange equities with the objective of delivering steady returns while minimizing correlation with the market. A robust feature set is integrated combining momentum-based indicators, fundamental fa
The M6 Competition assessed the performance of competitors using a ranked probability score and an information ratio (IR). While these metrics do well at picking the winners in the competition, crucial questions remain for investors with longer-term incentives. To address these questions, we compare
We investigate the concept of network momentum, a novel trading signal derived from momentum spillover across assets. Initially observed within the confines of pairwise economic and fundamental ties, such as the stock-bond connection of the same company and stocks linked through supply-demand chains
Active investing aims to construct a portfolio of assets that are believed to be relatively profitable in the markets, with one popular method being to construct a portfolio via factor-based strategies. In recent years, there have been increasing efforts to apply deep learning to pursue “deep factor
In this paper, we build on using the class of f-divergence induced coherent risk measures for portfolio optimization and derive its necessary optimality conditions formulated in CAPM format. We derive a new f-Beta similar to the Standard Betas and also extended it to previous works in Drawdown Betas
This article provides global evidence supporting the Low Volatility Anomaly: that low risk stocks consistently provide higher returns than high risk stocks. T
This paper develops an autonomous framework for systematic factor investing via agentic AI. Rather than relying on sequential manual prompts, our approach operationalizes the model as a self-directed engine that endogenously formulates interpretable trading signals. To mitigate data snooping biases,
Factor investing is ultimately grounded in market logic - the latent mechanism behind observed alpha factors that explains why they should persist across assets and regimes. However, recent factor mining prioritizes factor discovery over logic discovery, producing complex alpha factors with unclear
Driven by the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters and chronic climate threats, we investigate the impact of physical climate risk on global equity portfolios. By employing a panel regression analysis on sectoral returns, we provide statistical evidence that extreme temperature ev
Learning profitable intraday trading policies from financial time series is challenging due to heavy noise, non-stationarity, and strong cross-sectional dependence among related assets. We propose \emph{WaveLSFormer}, a learnable wavelet-based long-short Transformer that jointly performs multi-scale
We document a high-performing cross-sectional equity factor that achieves out-of-sample Sharpe ratios above 13 through regime-conditional signal activation. The strategy combines value and short-term reversal signals only during stock-specific drift regimes, defined as periods when individual stocks
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