Does Momentum Trading Generate Extra Downside Risk?

Author(s):  
Victoria Dobrynskaya

Momentum strategies tend to provide low returns during market crashes, and they crash themselves when the market rebounds after significant crashes. This is reflected by positive downside market betas and negative upside market betas of zero-cost momentum portfolios. Such asymmetry in upside and downside risks is unfavorable for investors and requires a risk premium. It arises mechanically because of momentum portfolio rebalancing based on trailing asset performance. The asymmetry in upside and downside risks is a robust unifying feature of momentum portfolios in various geographical and asset markets. The momentum premium can be rationalized within a standard asset-pricing framework, where upside and downside risks are priced differently.

Economies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 86
Author(s):  
Renata Guobužaitė ◽  
Deimantė Teresienė

Systematic momentum trading is a prevalent risk premium strategy in different portfolios. This paper focuses on the performance of the managed futures strategy based on the momentum signal across different economic regimes, focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic period. COVID-19 had a solid but short-lived impact on financial markets, and therefore gives a unique insight into momentum strategies’ performance during such critical moments of market stress. We offer a new approach to implementing momentum strategies by adding macroeconomic variables to the model. We test a managed futures strategy’s performance with a well-diversified futures portfolio across different asset classes. The research concludes that constructing a portfolio based on academically/economically sound momentum signals with its allocation timing based on broader economic factors significantly improves managed futures strategies and adds significant diversification benefits to the investors’ portfolios.


Mathematics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 1732
Author(s):  
Mohammad Enamul Hoque ◽  
Soo-Wah Low

This study employs a mean semi-variance asset pricing framework to examine the influence of risk factors on stock returns of oil and gas companies. This study also examines how downside risk is priced in stock performance. The time-series estimations expose that market, size, momentum, oil, gas, and exchange rate have significant impacts on oil and gas stock returns, but effects are heterogeneous depending on an individual stock. The two-stage cross-section estimations provide new insights about investors’ risk-return trade-off when facing downside risks. The results show that downside risk exposures to market, momentum, oil, and exchange rate factors are negatively priced in the Malaysian oil and gas stocks. This implies that investors are penalized for their downside exposure to these risk factors, and such inference is consistent with the risk preference explanation of prospect theory. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is the only risk factor found to be positively priced in the returns of oil and gas stocks. Additionally, we find a negative relationship between LNG factor and total risk. This suggests that as the risk exposure to LNG increases, the total risk decreases, implying that the LNG risk factor is an idiosyncratic risk and not a systematic risk factor. Such interpretation is consistent with the correlation result, which shows no association between LNG and the market risk factor.


Author(s):  
Anna Rutkowska-Ziarko ◽  
Lesław Markowski

<p>Theoretical background: The variability of the company’s profitability is the result of the accompanying risk. To compare the profitability of many companies, relative profitability measures, which include profitability ratios, are more convenient. This article analyses market and accounting risk factors of CAPM. Risk was considered in variance and downside framework. Market betas, accounting betas were used in an extended version of the asset pricing model. Additionally, the influence of profitability ratios, such as ROA and ROE on the average rate of return on the capital market are considered.</p><p>Purpose of the article: The main purpose of this study is to test the standard and extended CAPM relations between systematic risk measures and mean returns for single companies quoted on the Polish capital market and equally-weighted portfolios in two approaches: variance and downside risk.</p><p>Research methods: The research based on individual securities and portfolios, compares the one-factor risk-return relationships with two-factor ones estimated using mean returns in cross-sectional regressions. The regressors were expressed in absolute terms and classical and downside beta coefficients. The sample includes companies differing in terms of size and across different industries.</p><p>Main findings: Portfolios with higher classical or downside market betas generate higher mean returns. The negative risk premium for accounting betas for variance and downside risk was identified. It is not in accordance with our earlier study of the Polish construction sector, where a positive and significant risk premium for downside accounting betas was found. The highest explanatory power of rates on returns on the Polish capital market were found for average ROA and ROE. This confirms the results of the previous studies on the Polish capital market for food and construction sectors.</p>


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