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Friday, April 25, 2025

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Factors—Theory, Statistics, and Practice

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 Ryan C. Meyers, Account Manager at Institutional Investor

 Tuesday, April 4, 2017

"How do we decide what is a legitimate set of factors, let alone what is optimal? The late Stephen Ross offers his thoughts on factors in the Invited Editorial Comment of the new Journal of Portfolio Management Quantitative Equity Strategies special issue - http://www.iijournals.com/doi/full/10.3905/jpm.2017.43.5.001


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4 comments on article "Factors—Theory, Statistics, and Practice"

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 Steve Moffitt, President at Market Pattern Research, Inc

 Tuesday, April 11, 2017



Ross makes important points in his article, that there are no apparent limits to the number of market factors and that an economic justification for them is often lacking. I think his and most theorists' understandings which are guided by CAPM and APT, are instead misguided. The important point they miss in their analysis of prices as statistical processes, is that factor trading is in terms used by DeLong, Shleifer, Summers and Waldman, a "positive feedback" process. In plain English, more factor traders (up to a point) will improve the returns of the strategy! But eventually, the strategies get "crowded" and the great returns disappear. See my paper http://ssrn.com/abstract=2925532, my books "The Strategic Analysis of Financial Markets" available on Amazon, May 7 of the excellent book "The Crisis of Crowding," by Ludwig Chincarini.


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 Dr. Debashis Dutta, Senior Manager, Financial Service Risk Management, Advisory at EY

 Tuesday, April 11, 2017



pretty interesting read Ryan!


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 Dr. Debashis Dutta, Senior Manager, Financial Service Risk Management, Advisory at EY

 Tuesday, April 11, 2017



like your paper Steve!! just downloaded..


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 Edward Golosov, Committed and engaged thought leader on investment products, with focus on Risk Premia, Smart Beta and Factor Investing

 Thursday, April 13, 2017



APT is one of those remarkable things that was formulated early but never actually got full attention, let alone properly understood, by the finance community. It combines two novel (at the time) ideas: there are factors (whatever they are) affecting (and explaining) asset returns and, should the realised returns deviate from the expected based on the value of the factors, arbitragers would arbitrage those differences away. Ross, as the father of the theory, does not hesitate to point to the weakness of APT: it does not actually say what those factors are, nor does it say why they exist in the first place. That is one reason why CAPM has been more accepted: any MBA student can understand why the market return should be a factor - why would an idiosyncratic risk to some small mediocre stock be rewarded? Not so easy with the APT. But APT it is an important step toward understanding what drives the returns: shame it has taken 30+ years (and still going) to see the next step....

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