Forecasting stock market returns has great significance to asset allocation, risk management, and asset pricing, but stock return prediction is notoriously difficult. In this paper, we combine the sum-of-the-parts (SOP) method and three kinds of economic constraint methods: non-negative economic constraint strategy, momentum of return prediction strategy, and three-sigma strategy to improve prediction performance of stock returns, in which the price-earnings ratio growth rate (gm) is predicted by economic constraint methods. Empirical results suggest that the stock return forecasts by proposed models are both statistically and economically significant. The predictions of proposed models are robust to various robustness tests.
We find that combining two important predictors, stock market implied volatility and oil volatility, can improve the predictability of stock return volatility. We also document that the stock market implied volatility provides far more significant predictability than the oil volatility and other nonoil macroeconomic and financial variables. The empirical results show the “kitchen sink” combination approach that using two predictors jointly performs better than not only the univariate regression models which use oil volatility or stock market implied volatility separately but also convex combination of the individual forecasts. This improvement of predictability is also remarkable when we consider the business cycle. Furthermore, the robust test based on different lag lengths and different macroinformation shows that our forecasting strategy is efficient.
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