Archive for February 2014
Are There Rebalance Bonuses?
Posted on: February 24, 2014
Professor Kenneth French
Last month I did a study to understand why equally weighted the S&P 500 index RSP has outperformed value weighted S&P 500 index SPY by almost 3% a year since its inception. My conclusion is that it’s mostly due to Fama French risk factor loading.
However, my research also found after removing the effect of risk factors, RSP has a slight alpha advantage over SPY. I conjecture this alpha advantage is due to the fact that RSP requires annual rebalancing and SPY does not. In other word, this could be the so-called “rebalance bonus.”
To test its robustness, I extended my study to six pair of Fama French “indices.”
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Despite higher tax rates, S corporations retain advantages over C corporations
Posted on: February 10, 2014
(I got this from Cal Klausner, a CPA friend of mine.)
After recent tax changes, owners of small businesses face a question: Should the business continue to function as an S corporation, or should the entity revoke its election under Subchapter S of the Code?
Despite a number of statutory constraints, conventional wisdom has generally favored an S corporation classification. An S corporation is a pass-through entity whose shareholders are subject to personal income tax based on the income of the corporation. A C corporation, by contrast, is taxed as a separate entity at corporate rates, and its distributions to shareholders are subject to the personal income tax. A small business corporation electing under Subchapter S may have no more than 100 shareholders, and may not have more than one class of stock. There are no similar constraints on C corporations. Nevertheless, an S corporation classification provides business owners a superior degree of flexibility and is therefore generally preferred. Specifically, by having its income flow directly to its shareholders, an S corporation is not subject to the double taxation that a C corporation may be unable to avoid.
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January Indicator: 2014 Could Be a Year of Opportunity for Wealth Accumulator
Posted on: February 6, 2014
Last year after the market was up about 5% in January, I wrote a newsletter to introduce my clients to the so-called “January Indicator”:
According to research done by Cooper and McConnell, what the market does in January has a strong predictive power for what the market will do for the rest of the year.
Using data since 1940, they found that if the market is up in January, it will rise an additional 14.8% for the rest of the year; if the market is down in January, it will rise only 2.92% for the rest of the year. This gives rise to a spread of almost 12%, a highly statistically significant number.
According to Sam Stovall, chief equity strategist at S&P Capital IQ, the S&P 500 since 1945 has risen 56% of the time following a down January. That is lower than the 84% frequency of February-through-December gains following a higher market in January.
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