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Comment by cowsandmilk | Hacker News Reader

Read the linked journal article; the authors don’t actually claim it is about cognitive ability, they attribute it to lower risk taking on those days.

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As someone who works for a quantitative hedge fund, you wouldn't believe how many similar results I see of researchers showing a statistically significant predictor of stock market returns. Almost every single one of them is garbage.

But your point stands. The paper has nothing to do with cognitive ability. So why is it being used as evidence?

> As someone who works for a quantitative hedge fund, you wouldn't believe how many similar results I see of researchers showing a statistically significant predictor of stock market returns. Almost every single one of them is garbage.

Are you able to share any that aren't (or weren't) garbage?

Ones that aren't garbage are valuable! Until the rest of the market adjusts, and then they're garbage.

He could share past insights that are no longer relevant. I obviously don't expect him to give away a stock tip worth millions of dollars.

Exactly, there is no actionable publicly known indicator. Because the moment it becomes known by a large enough group of traders, it becomes useless.

Here's a disappointingly simple and well known one: Momentum. It produces real, statistically significantly, excess risk-adjusted returns over an index.

The remarkable thing is that it has been well known for decades, and continues to work. Many fortunes have been made by systematically exploiting it.

Is it even possible for a statistically significant predictor of stock market to be both known to the public and not garbage?

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