Working Paper

Market timing with aggregate and idiosyncratic stock volatilities

Abstract: Guo and Savickas [2005] show that aggregate stock market volatility and average idiosyncratic stock volatility jointly forecast stock returns. In this paper, we quantify the economic significance of their results from the perspective of a portfolio manager. That is, we evaluate the performance, e.g., the Sharpe ratio and Jensen's alpha, of a mean-variance manager who tries to time the market based on those two variables. We find that, over the period 1968-2004, the associated market-timing strategy outperforms the buy-and-hold strategy, and the difference is statistically and economically significant.

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Part of Series: Working Papers

Publication Date: 2006

Number: 2005-073