International Journal of Financial Studies Buy and Hold in the New Age of Stock Market Volatility: A Story about ETFs (original) (raw)
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Buy and Hold in the New Age of Stock Market Volatility: A Story about ETFs
International Journal of Financial Studies
The buy and hold stock market strategy, which gained tremendous popularity in the 1970s, may no longer be such a profitable method for accumulating wealth for the average investor in the new millennium. This paper investigates the relationship between compound return and holding period length to see how long an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) investment must be held before a positive return on principal is 100% likely. Because the ETF is a relatively new investment vehicle that could be considered particularly well-suited to the requirements of the buy and hold strategy, we begin our investigation here. We find that the compound returns earned over a rolling holding period are much more volatile than one might assume given historic rules of thumb for average return expectations. Using monthly return data for all listed NASDAQ ETFs between their date of inception and 2015, we find it takes ten years for the average probability of a gain on principal to be over 95 percent.
Exchange Traded Funds as a Vehicle for Implementing End-of-Month Trading Strategies
Journal of Finance Issues, 2010
An Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) is a retail investment product which is designed to mirror the returns of a basket of assets, typically the stocks which comprise a particular market index. ETFs provide an efficient mechanism for individuals to enter investment positions in a broad market or industry sector index. End-of-Month (EOM) trading involves the timed switching from cash to market exposure and then back to cash, in an attempt to capture higher returns than is available to a buy-and-hold alternative. The effectiveness of EOM has been demonstrated in a number of studies, but transaction costs and, very importantly, regulatory restrictions have been implementation impediments faced by individual investors. In this sturdy, ETFs are examined for implementation efficiency for individual retirement account investors who wish to employ an EOM trading strategy.
An analytical performance comparison of exchange-traded funds with index funds: 2002–2010
2011
Exchange-traded Funds (ETFs) have been gaining increasing popularity in the investment community, as evidenced by their high growth both in the number of ETFs created and their net assets since 2000. As ETFs are in nature similar to index mutual funds, in this article we examine whether this growing demand for ETFs can be explained through their outperformance as compared with index mutual funds. We consider the population of all ETFs with inception dates before 2002 and then for each ETF found all the passive index mutual funds that had the same investment style as the selected ETF and had an inception date before 2002. This led to a sample of 230 paired matches for all the styles. Within each investment style we matched every ETF with all the passive index funds in that investment style and compared the performances of the matched pairs in terms of Sharpe Ratios and risk-adjusted buy and hold total returns for the period 2002–2010. We then applied the Wilcoxon signed rank test to ...
“Stale Prices and Strategies for Trading Mutual Funds”: Authors' Response
Financial Analysts Journal, 2003
We demonstrate that an institutional feature of numerous mutual funds, managing billions in assets, generates fund NAVs that reflect stale prices. Since, in many cases, investors can trade at these NAVs with limited transactions costs, there is an obvious trading opportunity. These opportunities are especially prevalent in international funds that buy Japanese or European equities.
The effect of ETFs on financial markets: a literature review
Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, 2020
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) belong to the fastest growing investment products worldwide. Within 15 years, total assets invested in ETFs have twenty-folded, reaching over $3.7 trillion at the end of 2018. Increasing demand for passive investments, coupled with high liquidity and low transaction costs, are key advantages of ETFs compared to their closest substitutes such as traditional index funds. Besides the continuous growth of ETFs, the Flash Crash in 2010 triggered detailed investigations by regulators on how ETFs affect the financial market. This literature review provides a broad overview of recent academic studies analyzing the effect of ETFs on liquidity, price discovery, volatility, and comovement of the underlying securities.
The performance and trading characteristics of exchange-traded funds
This study examines the performance and trading characteristics of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Australia. We investigate the ability of index oriented (classical) ETFs to track underlying equity benchmarks on the Australian Stock Exchange, and provide a comparison of the tracking error volatility between these types of market-traded instruments and equity index funds operated off-market. Our study finds that while index-oriented ETFs closely track their respective benchmarks, these instruments have not been embraced to the same extent as in overseas markets, and relative to off-market index managed funds. Our research provides an important comparison of classical ETFs between Australia and the United States.
Evaluating A Buy and Hold Strategy for the S&P 500 Index
In this paper, we calculate the real rate of return from purchasing the S&P 500 index from 1871 through 2001. We assume the investor purchases the index in January of each year and holds it forever, consuming dividends, but never selling the index itself or else selling it after its present value is dwarfed by the present value of the dividend flows. The calculations rest on best guesses about post 2000 dividends. These we infer from past behavior. The highest real return was 13.02% for a purchase in June 1932. The lowest was 2.88% for August 2000. The expected return for a purchase in January 2001 was 3.08%. To raise it to the 5% that we judge the minimum return necessary to maintain investor interest, the S&P 500 index would have had to fall by 53% from its January 2001 value of 1336 to 624.
2016
The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
The effect of ETFs on financial markets
2019
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) belong to the fastest growing investment products worldwide. Within 15 years, total assets invested in ETFs have twenty-folded, reaching over $3.7 trillion at the end of 2018. Increasing demand for passive investments, coupled with high liquidity and low transaction costs are key advantages of ETFs compared to their closest substitutes such as traditional index funds. Besides the continuous growth of ETFs, the Flash Crash in 2010 triggered detailed investigations by regulators on how ETFs affect the financial market. This literature review gives the reader a broad overview of recent academic studies analysing the effect of ETFs on liquidity, price discovery, volatility and comovement of the underlying securities.