Various studies report that investing in “sin stocks”—firms that make money from human vices such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and weapons—has historically delivered significantly positive abnormal returns. This finding has inspired the hypothesis that sin stocks are shunned to such an extent that they become systematically underpriced, enabling investors who are willing to bear the reputation risk involved with investing in these stocks to earn a return premium. In this article, the authors further investigate this notion, finding that the performance of sin stocks can be fully explained by the two new quality factors in the recently introduced Fama–French five-factor model, profitability and investment. Their finding is robust over time and across different markets. In short, there is no evidence that sin stocks provide a premium for reputation risk after controlling for their exposure to factors in today’s asset pricing models.

With the increased acceptance of capital market efficiency, there has been a significant increase in the money managed on an indexed basis. Several methodologies are available to replicate the target index. In this paper, we discuss the problems of (1) defining suitable performance objectives and tracking error that scale properly over the entire management period and (2) implementing an optimal investment strategy when full replication of an index is not deemed suitable. We then argue that clustering might be a viable methodology for building parsimonious tracking portfolios. With suitably defined distances between the time series of asset prices, clustering ‘discovers’ the correlation and cointegration structure of an index. Sampling the clusters with appropriate heuristics and optimization techniques, an optimal tracking portfolio can be constructed. One advantage of this approach is that it eschews the difficulties and computational burden of density forecasts and full optimization.

In the beginning real estate was regarded as a diversifier, bolstered by the Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974. However, given real estate's nature as a debt-equity hybrid and the emergence of new ways to invest in real estate markets, it is clear that there could be additional motivations for choosing to include real estate in a mixed asset portfolio. This article explores 5 possible uses for real estate: to reduce overall portfolio risk, to achieve high absolute returns, to hedge unexpected inflation or deflation, to reflect the overall investment universe and/or to deliver strong cash flows to the investor. But first we must re-define real estate to encompass the new public debt and equity markets that have joined the traditional private debt and equity markets for real estate. A new index of overall real estate performance is presented. The article concludes by considering the types of investors who might see a role for real estate; several classes of investor would likely benefit from the incl...