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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10920 |
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Table of Contents:
- We study the data-generating processes for factors expressed in return differences, which the literature on time-series asset pricing seems to have overlooked. For the factors' data-generating processes or long-short zero-cost portfolios, a meaningful definition of returns is impossible; further, the compounded market factor (MF) significantly underestimates the return difference between the market and the risk-free rate compounded separately. Surprisingly, if MF were treated coercively as periodic-rebalancing long-short (i.e., the same as size and value), Fama-French three-factor (FF3) would be economically unattractive for lacking compounding and irrelevant for suffering from the small "size of an effect." Otherwise, FF3 might be misspecified if MF were buy-and-hold long-short. Finally, we show that OLS with net returns for single-index models leads to inflated alphas, exaggerated t-values, and overestimated Sharpe ratios (SR); worse, net returns may lead to pathological alphas and SRs. We propose defining factors (and SRs) with non-difference compound returns.