Brian C. Payne

Health Care Investing: Is a Higher Dose of Health CareGood for the Portfolio?

The health care industry has grown five-fold as a percentage of total U.S. market capitalization since 1930 and has been a relevant economic force in the U.S. equity markets since the mid-1980s. This study analyzes the health care industry as an investment opportunity and finds that overweighting the U.S. equity portion of a portfolio toward health care generates greater returns, enhanced diversification, and positive alphas. In terms of risk and return, the industry also expands the attainable set of investment portfolios beyond those formed using other major industries’ equities. Over the past 25 years, health care industry returns have generated an annual alpha of 180 (360) basis points over the CAPM (four-factor model). These appealing aspects of the health care sector suggest that a slightly increased dosage of health care in a portfolio “did no harm.”

Sentiment and Stock Returns: Anticipating a Major Sporting Event

This study documents the effect of the Super Bowl on the stock returns of firms that are geographically associated with the competing teams. We find significant upward return drift in the 9 trading days leading up to the Super Bowl, a pattern consistent with investors trading in anticipation of the game itself. The “anticipatory behavior” among investors leads to widespread pregame returns, which is not documented in prior studies. These pre-event abnormal returns are positive and statistically and economically significant for all firms, and the size of pre-event returns varies according to each team’s favored status. In addition, firms associated with the winning team exhibit significant positive return drift over the 10-day period after their win. Firms associated with the losing team exhibit moderate downward drift. Our findings are strongest among the smallest quintile of firms and are robust to various risk adjustments and using a matched sample control group. The collective findings suggest that only by standing on the sideline will investors avoid winning around the Super Bowl.

Fees Eat Diversification's Lunch

Diversification is often spoken of as the only free lunch in investing, yet we show that it is not free and is properly considered only in light of its costs. More-exotic asset classes typically come with a higher price tag. We show that fees on diversifying asset classes are high relative to their risk-adjusted diversification benefit. Because there is meaningful cross-sectional variation, fees need to be part of asset mix decisions and strategic asset allocation.

Presidential parties, monetary regimes, and health care returns

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the absolute and risk-adjusted stock return performance of the US health care industry conditional upon the presidential administration’s political party and the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy stance. It evaluates this return behavior across the 60-year time period from 1954 to 2013, and sub-divides this entire period into the pre-Medicare period (1954-1964), Medicare period (1965-1984), and Medicare-plus-high-health-care-inflation period (1985-2013). Design/methodology/approach - – The study uses monthly returns to the health care industry and overall market, characterizing each sample month as either having a Republican or Democratic president and either a contractionary or expansionary monetary policy regime determined by whether the Federal Reserve is increasing or decreasing interest rates, respectively. It incorporates univariate and multivariate analysis to quantify the return behavior of both the health care industry and the overall market during the entire period and all three sub-periods. Additionally, it utilizes a common four-factor multivariate regression model and associated hypothesis testing to characterize risk-adjusted excess returns (i.e. Findings - – The health care industry has earned robust, positive risk-adjusted returns with the magnitude of the returns sensitive to the political party of the administration and the monetary policy regime. The authors find that prior to 1965 (1954-1964), when the president was a Republican, during times of monetary contraction, health care earned an excess risk-adjusted return. There was no association between Democratic administrations and excess health care returns prior to 1965. In contrast, the authors find that after 1965 this relationship changes. The authors find that returns to health care were positive for Republicans during times of monetary expansion and positive for Democrats during monetary contraction. The authors also find this relationship has become more pronounced after 1984. Originality/value - – The study extends prior literature, which has shown that the health care industry is a priced factor in the US stock market and that it provides significant risk-adjusted returns in the recent past. Uniquely, this study shows that the excess returns to health care vary considerably over the past 60 years, and that these excess returns are quite sensitive to political policy, proxied by the presidential administration party, and monetary policy, as measured using Fed discount rate changes. These findings have implications for management and shareholders of highly regulated and subsidized industries and firms.

Hedge fund replication with a genetic algorithm: breeding a usable mousetrap

This study tests the performance of 14 hedge fund index clones created using parsimonious out-of-sample replication portfolios consisting solely of easily accessible assets. We employ a genetic algorithm to integrate two traditional hedge fund replication methods, the factor-based and pay-off distribution replication methods, and evaluate over 4500 commonly held stocks, bonds and mutual funds as replicating portfolio components. In-sample performance indicates that hedge funds have return series similar to portfolios of commonly held assets, and out-of-sample results provide evidence that the in-sample relationships can hold with infrequent rebalancing. This hedge fund replication attempt rates well relatively to prior efforts as 11 replicating portfolios have out-of-sample correlation values of at least 60%. Overall, these results show promise for using a genetic algorithm technique to replicate hedge fund returns.

Implied Discount Rates for the U.S. Military Blended Retirement System

We evaluate the 2018 option for U.S. military service members to switch from the legacy defined benefit (DB) pension to the new DB/DC hybrid Blended Retirement System. We show that the required return on the pre-retirement matching and incentives in the new system is unrealistically high. Alternatively, those switching to the new system must anticipate a substantial improvement to the current levels of incentive Continuation Pay. We construct our own analysis and a calculator that takes a financial economics perspective missing from previous analyses of the decision as well as consider the positive attributes of the Blended Retirement System. We conclude that those facing the 2018 choice between the two plans should favor the current DB plan if they anticipate serving 20 years.

Implied Volatility across Geographical Markets and Asset Classes

Derivatives based on the VIX index and related indexes in the U.S. and around the world have proliferated enormously in the last few years. This article reviews the behavior of VIX-like indexes in 14 markets in 8 countries. Eleven are stock indexes, 2 are commodities, and the last is the USD–EUR exchange rate. A simple GARCH-family model for the change and volatility of the index is fitted to index returns, implied volatility (i.e., lagged IV), and the U.S. VIX (as a proxy for global volatility conditions). Separate coefficients are estimated for positive and negative variable values, which reveals that negative market returns cause sharp and immediate increases in the volatility index, but positive returns reduce implied volatility by a lesser amount and the effect is spread out over time. Including lagged factors from the previous day was important, especially for the smaller markets. The U.S. VIX was found to influence all of the other markets, thus suggesting the existence of a global volatility factor that can be proxied by the VIX, and the evidence indicates that volatility appears to spill over from the first-tier markets to the smaller ones.

Minding the Terrazzo Gap between Athletes and Nonathletes

The tension between focusing on collegiate athletic or academic performance has persisted for decades. A recent study finds that recruited athletes in college athletic programs underperform academically, earning lower grades than predicted. It postulates that increased representativeness and integration efforts will enhance the academic value of college athletes’ experience. The U.S. Air Force Academy system presents a natural experiment of whether such efforts can affect student-athlete academic performance. In this setting, we find that student-athletes perform comparably to nonathletes after controlling for predicted academic performance.

The LSI or DCA decision: investing strategies for the lump sum averse

A recent study finds that a Lump Sum Investing (LSI) strategy outperformed a Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) strategy approximately twothirds of the time between January 1927 and December 2011 using multiple DCA periods and adjusting for risk. This study extends these findings by examining other risk adjustment measures as well as analysing shorter DCA periods and timing considerations. Focusing on the US stock market for the past 20 years, the LSI strategy does not dominate DCA as strongly as the prior results indicate. Instead, the decision is sensitive to the DCA duration, the timing of strategy implementation and the risk-adjustment method considered.