Economic activity and momentum profits: Further evidence

Economic Fundamentals, Risk, and Momentum Profits

We study empirically the changes in economic fundamentals for firms with recent stock price momentum. We find that: (i) winners have temporarily higher dividend, investment, and sales growth rates, and losers have temporarily lower dividend, investment, and sales growth rates; (ii) the duration of the growth rate dispersion matches approximately that of the momentum profits; (iii) past returns ...

Momentum Profits and Macroeconomic Risk

Previous work shows that the growth rate of industrial production is a common macroeconomic risk factor in the cross-section of expected returns. We demonstrate the connection between momentum profits and shifts in factor loadings on this macroeconomic variable. Winners have temporarily higher loadings on the growth rate of industrial production than losers. The loading dispersion derives mostl...

Investment-Based Momentum Profits

We offer an investment-based explanation of momentum. The neoclassical theory of investment implies that expected stock returns are related to expected investment returns, defined as the next-period marginal benefits of investment divided by the current-period marginal costs of investment. Empirically, winners have higher expected growth of investment-to-capital and higher expected marginal pro...

Momentum and Contrarian Profits and Macroeconomic Fundamentals

We show that the existence of momentum and contrarian profits imposes restrictions on stochastic discount factors used to price stocks in equity markets. For several widely used asset pricing models, we demonstrate that these restrictions imply testable forms of intertemporal dependence in macroeconomic fundamentals such as consumption growth rate. Extensive empirical analysis provides supporti...

Momentum Profits and Non-Normality Risks