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Alternative Thinking
Can Machines Time Markets? The Virtue of Complexity in Return Prediction
May 6, 2024
Common wisdom has suggested that small, simple models are best suited for market timing applications, given finance’s “small data” constraint and naturally low predictability. However, we show that complex models better identify true nonlinear relationships and therefore produce better market timing strategy performance. We validate this "virtue of complexity" result in three practical market timing applications.
Journal Article
The Virtue of Complexity in Return Prediction
March 1, 2024
Contrary to conventional wisdom, we theoretically prove that simple models severely understate return predictability compared to “complex” models in which the number of parameters exceeds the number of observations. We empirically document the virtue of complexity in U.S. equity market return prediction. Our findings establish the rationale for modeling expected returns through machine learning.
Working Paper
How Global is Predictability?
November 3, 2023
We show that asset pricing has a strong global component in the sense that a common global model has stronger predictability of stock returns than local models estimated in each country – even when the global model is estimated without the use of local data. Nevertheless, asset pricing has a small local component – in order to detect it, we develop a refined transfer learning model that gains power and precision by building off the global component.
Working Paper
Financial Machine Learning
August 1, 2023
In this survey the nascent literature on machine learning in financial markets, we highlight the best examples of what this line of research has to offer and recommend promising directions for future research.
Working Paper
Machine Learning and the Implementable Efficient Frontier
August 18, 2022
We propose that investment strategies should be evaluated based on their net-of-trading-cost return for each level of risk, which we term the "implementable efficient frontier." While numerous studies use machine learning return forecasts to generate portfolios, their agnosticism toward trading costs leads to excessive reliance on fleeting small-scale characteristics, resulting in poor net returns. We develop a framework that produces a superior frontier by integrating trading-cost-aware portfolio optimization with machine learning
Journal Article
Principal Portfolios
July 7, 2020
We propose a new asset-pricing framework in which all securities’ signals are used to predict each individual return. While the literature focuses on each security’s own- signal predictability, assuming an equal strength across securities, our framework is flexible and includes cross-predictability.
Journal Article
Enhanced Portfolio Optimization
March 2, 2020
We show how to identify the portfolios that cause problems in standard mean-variance optimization (MVO) and develop an enhanced portfolio optimization (EPO) method that addresses the problems. Applying EPO on several realistic datasets, we find significant gains relative to standard benchmarks.
Working Paper
Predicting Returns with Text Data
December 19, 2019
We introduce a new text-mining methodology that extracts sentiment information from news articles to predict asset returns.
Journal Article
Can Machines "Learn" Finance?
June 7, 2019
Can Machines “Learn” Finance?” was named the winner of the 2020 Harry M. Markowitz Award. Machine learning for asset management faces a unique set of challenges that differ markedly from other domains where machine learning has excelled. We discuss a variety of beneficial use cases and potential pitfalls for machine learning in asset management, and emphasize the importance of economic theory and human expertise for achieving success through financial machine learning.
Working Paper
Hedging Climate Change News
May 22, 2019
We propose and implement a procedure to dynamically hedge climate change risk and discuss multiple directions for future research on financial approaches to managing climate risk.