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.
Motivated by practical applications, we explore the constrained multi-period mean-variance portfolio selection problem within a market characterized by a dynamic factor model. This model captures predictability in asset returns driven by state variables and incorporates cone-type portfolio constrain
Detecting anomalous trajectories in decentralized crypto networks is fundamentally challenged by extreme label scarcity and the adaptive evasion strategies of illicit actors. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) effectively capture local structural patterns, they struggle to internalize multi hop, log
Classical finance models are based on the premise that investors act rationally and utilize all available information when making portfolio decisions. However, these models often fail to capture the anomalies observed in intertemporal choices and decision-making under uncertainty, particularly when
Herding behavior has become a familiar phenomenon to investors, with potential dangers of both undervaluing and overvaluing assets, while also threatening market stability. This study contributes to the literature on herding behavior by using a recent dataset, covering the most impactful events of r
We study a discrete-time consumption-based capital asset pricing model under expectations-based reference-dependent preferences. More precisely, we consider an endowment economy populated by a representative agent who derives utility from current consumption and from gains and losses in consumption
News may reveal systematic risk, but whether its context enhances the construction of systematic risk factors is still unclear. We seek to test whether utilizing a sentence transformer represents an improvement over techniques such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) in the coherence of topic term
In this work we evaluate the performance of three classes of methods for detecting financial anomalies: topological data analysis (TDA), principal component analyis (PCA), and Neural Network-based approaches. We apply these methods to the TSX-60 data to identify major financial stress events in the
Sparsity or complexity? In modern high-dimensional asset pricing, these are often viewed as competing principles: richer feature spaces appear to favor complexity, while economic intuition has long favored parsimony. We show that this tension is misplaced. We distinguish capacity sparsity-the dimens
This paper makes the Millennium Prize problem P vs NP operational in quantitative finance by studying cardinality-constrained portfolio selection. Starting from the convex Markowitz mean-variance program with CAPM-based expected returns (Rf plus beta times ERP), we impose a hard sparsity rule that l
The paper centers on the estimation of the equity risk premium using established financial models (CAPM, Gordon Growth), involving algebraic and present value formulas, but focuses heavily on practical, data-driven applications like historical returns analysis, survey methods, and implied premium ca
This study proposes a behaviorally-informed multi-factor stock selection framework that integrates short-cycle technical alpha signals with deep learning. We design a dual-task multilayer perceptron (MLP) that jointly predicts five-day future returns and directional price movements, thereby capturin
This paper proposes a new algorithm – Trading Graph Neural Network (TGNN) that can structurally estimate the impact of asset features, dealer features and relationship features on asset prices in trading networks. It combines the strength of the traditional simulated method of moments (SMM) and rece
We revisit the long-only trend-following strategy presented in A Century of Profitable Industry Trends by Zarattini and Antonacci, which achieved exceptional historical performance with an 18.2% annualized return and a Sharpe Ratio of 1.39. While the results outperformed benchmarks, practical implem
We identify a new type of risk, common firm-level investor fears, from commonalities within the cross-sectional distribution of individual stock options. We define firm-level fears that link with upward price movements as good fears, and those relating to downward price movements as bad fears. Such
This paper proposes an expected multivariate utility analysis for ESG investors in which green stocks, brown stocks, and a market index are modeled in a one-factor, CAPM-type structure. This setting allows investors to accommodate their preferences for green investments according to proper risk aver
In the field of quantitative finance, volatility models, such as ARCH, GARCH, FIGARCH, SV, EWMA, play the key role in risk and portfolio management. Meanwhile, factor investing is more and more famous since mid of 20 century. CAPM, Fama French three factor model, Fama French five-factor model, MSCI
We propose a model to forecast large realized covariance matrices of returns, applying it to the constituents of the S&P 500 daily. To address the curse of dimensionality, we decompose the return covariance matrix using standard firm-level factors (e.g., size, value, and profitability) and use sect
Selecting stock portfolios and assessing their relative volatility risk compared to the market as a whole, market indices, or other portfolios is of great importance to professional fund managers and individual investors alike. Our research uses the cross-sectional intrinsic entropy (CSIE) model to
We study the correlation structure of firm growth rates. We show that most firms are correlated because of their exposure to a common factor but that firms linked through the supply chain exhibit a stronger correlation on average than firms that are not. Removing this common factor significantly red
Sustainability in business and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) in finance have exploded in popularity among researchers and practitioners. We survey
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