This study investigates the existence of psychological barriers in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and six foreign stock indices. It is believed by many in the investment community that index levels that are multiples of 100 serve as barriers, and that markets may resist crossing these barriers. Although return dynamics in the neighborhood of barrier points are not identical for all series studied, we find aberrations in the conditional means and variances consistent with psychological barriers. In five of the eight indices studied, conditional mean returns are significantly higher after crossing a barrier as part of an upward move, while only two series exhibit significant mean effects after crossing a barrier as part of a downward move. In seven of the eight series studied, we find significant conditional variance effects coincident with a barrier crossing. In addition, most series exhibit evidence of autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (ARCH), generalized ARCH (GARCH), and leverage effects.

We examine returns and ending wealth in portfolios selected from 1,000 large U.S. stocks over a 20-year holding period. Shortfall risk, the possibility of ending wealth being below a target, is a useful metric for long horizon investors and is consistent with the Safety First criterion. Density functions obtained from simulations illustrate that shortfall risk reduction continues as portfolio size is increased, even above 100 stocks. A slightly lower risk can be achieved in small portfolios by diversifying across industries, but a greater reduction is obtained by simply increasing the number of stocks. Copyright 2007, The Eastern Finance Association.

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This paper documents a long‐lived asymmetrical relationship between interest rate changes and subsequent stock returns. Drops in interest rates are followed by twelve months of excess stock returns, while increases in interest rates have little effect. The results are robust to the choices of short‐term interest rate and stock index. These findings cannot be explained by Geske and Roll's [10] reversed causality argument; nor do they appear to result from periods of unusual interest rates or stock returns. Since interest rate changes are generally used as proxies for changes in expected inflation, the results provide new insights into previous research on inflation and stock returns, and there are important implications for the literature on time‐varying risk premia.

The Dow Dividend Strategy recommends the highest-yielding stocks from the 30 Dow Industrials. These stocks have come to be known as the “Dogs of the Dow” since they often include some of the previous year’s worst performers. While the strategy’s successes—and more recently, its failures—have been well documented in the popular press, there have not been any convincing explanations of why the strategy worked. This paper demonstrates that the behavior of these stocks is consistent with the market overreaction hypothesis. In years before the stock market crash of 1987, the dogs were indeed “losers” which went on to become “winners.” But in the post-crash period, the high-yield stocks actually outperformed the market during the previous year. The Dow Dividend Strategy is no longer selecting the true dogs. © 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.