Momentum · Han, Zhou, Zhu (2016)

Price Trend Factor

Combination of short-, medium-, and long-term moving averages of price used in a cross-sectional regression forecasting next-month returns, estimated among larger stocks. Long high minus short low quintile portfolio of stocks above the NYSE 20th size percentile, value-weighted, re-sorted monthly, hedged each month with a rolling 5-year market beta from prior months only (β = −0.23 at the end of the sample). Quarterly, 1929Q3 to 2024Q4.

Predicted alphareturn · posterior mean, % per year, averaged over the window
Next quarter
2027Q1
8.82%
95% interval 2.70% to 13.40%
Next year
2027Q1–2027Q4
8.87%
95% interval 2.77% to 13.39%
Next five years
2027Q1–2031Q4
9.11%
95% interval 3.13% to 13.39%

Forecast made 1 Oct 2026, conditioning on this portfolio's returns, which end 2024Q4 with Open Source Asset Pricing's data for the signal (TrendFactor). The 8 quarters between then and 2027Q1 are unobserved and are integrated out under the model.

Portfolio
Market hedge
Prior beliefsDefault
Half life of shocks to the edge How long an edge lasts once it appears. The model treats the edge -- the expected alpha under a market hedge, the expected return without one -- as a mean-reverting state; this is the prior on its half-life. A short half-life pulls the forecast back toward the long-run mean quickly, so recent performance counts for less. Short U(0, 5 years)Default U(0, 10 years)Long U(0, 20 years)
Long-run performance How much long-run edge the model is willing to believe in before the data insists on it. The prior on the portfolio's annualized risk-adjusted return (its information ratio under a hedge, Sharpe ratio without one) is centred on zero; this is its width. A narrow prior takes more evidence to move, so every forecast is pulled harder toward zero. Skeptical N(0, 0.2²)Default N(0, 0.4²)Permissive N(0, 0.6²)
Time variation in risk-adjusted returns How far an edge swings around its long-run level. The previous row sets how large that long-run level may be; this one sets how much the portfolio's risk-adjusted return wanders above and below it from quarter to quarter. Allow more, and a good or bad run reads as news about the edge rather than as noise. Conservative U(0, 0.25)Default U(0, 0.5)Aggressive U(0, 0.75)

Quintile and decile portfolios are sorted each month over common stocks on the NYSE, AMEX and Nasdaq whose market value is above the NYSE 20th percentile, with breakpoints computed over those same stocks, so every signal is measured on one universe. Original paper is Open Source Asset Pricing's replication of the paper's own portfolio, with its sort, weighting, stock screens and rebalancing.

Cumulative market-hedged returnreturn, unhedged

+1,831,342% since 1929Q3 · log scale

Past performance, annualized

Window AlphaReturn Vol. Info. ratioSharpe ratio t-stat
1929Q3–2024Q4 11.62% 15.51% 0.75 7.32
2020Q1–2024Q4 −0.24% 13.48% −0.02 −0.04
2024Q1–2024Q4 −3.40% 9.63% −0.35 −0.35

Forecast information ratioSharpe ratio, annualized

Window Mean 95% interval P(neg)
2027Q1 0.57 0.18 – 0.86 <0.01
2027Q1–2027Q4 0.57 0.17 – 0.87 <0.01
2027Q1–2031Q4 0.56 0.15 – 0.89 <0.01
Prior changed from site default.

Closest tradable stand-in

No close one. Every one of the ~870 ETFs that traded throughout 2020–2024, and every pair of them, was searched. The best of them reversed on data that had no say in picking it — a correlation of −0.33 — so the direction it was chosen in did not survive the held-out window. Whatever this signal sorts on, no listed fund holds it as an exposure.

Category
Momentum
Form
Continuous
Sorted on
High minus low
Names per leg
334 long / 334 short median · 110 at the 10th pctile
Original sample
1930–2014