Forecasting stock market returns by summing the frequency-decomposed parts

We generalize the Ferreira and Santa-Clara (2011) sum-of-the-parts method for forecasting stock market returns. Rather than summing the parts of stock returns, we suggest summing some of the frequency-decomposed parts. The proposed method significantly improves upon the original sum-of-the-parts and...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Faria, Gonçalo (author)
Other Authors: Verona, Fabio (author)
Format: article
Language:eng
Published: 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/25135
Country:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorio.ucp.pt:10400.14/25135
Description
Summary:We generalize the Ferreira and Santa-Clara (2011) sum-of-the-parts method for forecasting stock market returns. Rather than summing the parts of stock returns, we suggest summing some of the frequency-decomposed parts. The proposed method significantly improves upon the original sum-of-the-parts and delivers statistically and economically gains over historical mean forecasts, with monthly out-of-sample of 2.60% and annual utility gains of 558 basis points. The strong performance of this method comes from its ability to isolate the frequencies of the parts with the highest predictive power, and from the fact that the selected frequency-decomposed parts carry complementary information that captures different frequencies of stock market returns.