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.
Frozen large language model (LLM) checkpoints extract information from pre-cutoff public text that is associated with future fundamentals and equity returns beyond standard contemporaneous valuation measures. Because each frozen checkpoint has a fixed knowledge cutoff, it can be interpreted as a com
We utilize FinBERT, a domain-specific transformer model, to parse 6.5 million sentences from 16,428 S&P 500 quarterly earnings call transcripts (2015-2025) and demonstrate that post-earnings stock returns are not equally affected by all speakers in a conference call. Our section-weighted sentiment,
Cross-sectional dispersion in firm-level realized skewness is significantly and negatively related to future stock market returns. The predictive power of skewness dispersion is robust to in-sample and out-of-sample estimation and is incremental over a broad set of existing predictors, with only a f
Classical asset pricing relies on the risk-neutral measure $Q$ for valuation, yet its economic interpretation is typically anchored in a physical measure $P$. This creates an inherent asymmetry: pricing is governed by $Q$, while meaning resides in $P$, making it difficult to provide a unified accoun
We generalize the seminal framework of Kyle (1985) to a many-asset setting, bridging the gap between informed-trading theory and modern trading practices. Specifically, we formulate an infinite-dimensional Bayesian trading game in which the informed trader’s private information may concern arbitrary
Multi-hop reasoning over financial disclosures is often a retrieval problem before it becomes a reasoning or generation problem: relevant facts are dispersed across sections, filings, companies, and years, and LLMs often expend excessive tokens navigating noisy context. Without precise Knowledge Gra
In this article, we study optimal investment and consumption in an incomplete stochastic factor model for a power utility investor on the infinite horizon. When the state space of the stochastic factor is finite, we give a complete characterisation of the well-posedness of the problem, and provide a
A multi-factor extension of the Hobson and Rogers (HR) model, incorporating a quadratic variance function (QHR model), is proposed and analysed. The QHR model allows for greater flexibility in defining the moving average filter while maintaining the Markovian property of the original HR model. The u
This paper proposes a novel class of generalized Expected-Shortfall (ES) norms constructed via distortion risk measures, establishing a unified analytical framework for risk quantification. The proposed norms extend conventional ES methodology by incorporating flexible distortion functions. Specific
Making consistently profitable financial decisions in a continuously evolving and volatile stock market has always been a difficult task. Professionals from different disciplines have developed foundational theories to anticipate price movement and evaluate securities such as the famed Capital Asset
We give an abstract perspective on quadratic programming with an eye toward long portfolio theory geared toward explaining sparsity via maximum principles. Specifically, in optimal allocation problems, we see that support of an optimal distribution lies in a variety intersect a kind of distinguished
Mid-cap companies, generally valued between $2 billion and $10 billion, provide investors with a well-rounded opportunity between the fluctuation of small-cap stocks and the stability of large-cap stocks. This research builds upon the long-short equity approach (e.g., Michaud, 2018; Dimitriu, Alexan
A simple model-free and distribution-free statistic, the functional relationship between the number of “effective” degrees of freedom and portfolio size, or N*(N), is used to discriminate between two alternative models for the correlation of daily cryptocurrency returns within a retail universe of d
We present a unified, market-complete model that integrates both the Bachelier and Black-Scholes-Merton frameworks for asset pricing. The model allows for the study, within a unified framework, of asset pricing in a natural world that experiences the possibility of negative security prices or riskle
As algorithmic trading and electronic markets continue to transform the landscape of financial markets, detecting and deterring rogue agents to maintain a fair and efficient marketplace is crucial. The explosion of large datasets and the continually changing tricks of the trade make it difficult to
When analyzing the components influencing the stock prices, it is commonly believed that economic activities play an important role. More specifically, asset prices are more sensitive to the systematic economic news that impose a pervasive effect on the whole market. Moreover, the investors will not
Our study focuses on determining the presence of abnormal returns for physical momentum portfolios in the context of the Indian market. The physical momentum portfolios, comprising stocks from the NSE 500, are constructed for the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly timescales. In the aforementioned t
In this paper, we study the exponential utility indifference pricing of pure endowment policies within a stochastic-factor model for an insurer who also invests in a financial market. Our framework incorporates a hazard rate modeled as an observable diffusion process, while the risky asset price fol
Mining 29,000 accounting ratios for t-statistics $> 2.0$ leads to cross-sectional return predictability similar to the peer review process. For both, $\approx50%$ of predictability remains after the original sample periods. This finding holds for many categories of research, including research with
We define “deep value” as episodes where the valuation spread between cheap and expensive securities is wide relative to its history. Examining deep v
📬 The Quant Space Weekly
One email a week: the most interesting quant finance papers, scored and summarized. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.