The Market Replication Crisis That Wasn’t

Factor investing has long faced criticisms of data mining, and more recently faced another criticism – some backtests might never have been right to begin with. A growing body of mostly well-done papers examine these issues, generally concluding that factors have been disappointing since their “discovery.” We’ve long addressed these concerns through robust out-of-sample evidence and a compelling theory for why a factor should work. What we’ve lacked, until now, is a formal test. My colleagues’ new paper tests brilliantly, what we have argued, largely anecdotally, for years. Their results are rather startlingly (even to me) positive for the field in general. Read Full Article »