Jessica Wachter Named SEC Chief Economist and Director of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis

Press Release, May 3, 2021: The Dr. Bruce I. Jacobs Chair of Quantitative Finance at the Wharton School, Dr. Jessica Wachter, has been appointed Chief Economist and Director of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis at the SEC.

Factor Modeling: The Benefits of Disentangling Cross-Sectionally for Explaining Stock Returns

by Bruce I. Jacobs and Kenneth N. Levy, Journal of Portfolio Management, May 2021: More than three decades ago, Bruce Jacobs and Ken Levy introduced the idea of disentangling stock returns across numerous firm characteristic factors. Some years later, an alternative factor model proposed by Fama and French made use of time-series... factors based on portfolio sorts (examples of these time-series factors include the return differences between small- and big-capitalization stocks and between high- and low-book-to-price stocks). Recently, Fama and French found that the cross-sectional approach using firm characteristics is better able to explain stock returns than the time-series approach based on portfolio sorts. In this article, Jacobs and Levy compare the two models and discuss the benefits of the cross-sectional approach for investment management.

Book Review: Too Smart for Our Own Good

by Nick Ronalds, CFA Institute Enterprising Investor, March 4, 2021: Reviewer Nick Ronalds said the core thesis of Bruce Jacobs’s book Too Smart for Our Own Good: Ingenious Investment Strategies, Illusions of Safety, and Market Crashes “should be taken to heart not only by investment professionals but by all investors... Free-lunch promises, complexity, opacity, and excessive leverage have too often combined to toxic effect. Financial professionals in particular could benefit greatly from studying the market crises analyzed in this book and the key lessons to be drawn from them.” Ronalds also chronicled Jacobs's long history of pushing back against flawed investment theories, noting his head-to-head debates with the creators of portfolio insurance in the 1980s, his 1999 book Capital Ideas and Market Realities: Option Replication, Investor Behavior, and Stock Market Crashes, and his role in creating the National Institute of Finance, a predecessor of the Financial Stability Oversight Council.