U.S. Halloween retailing in 2020 and 2021 was spooked by the pandemic. Last year, supply issues left shoppers with empty shelves at big box stores such as Target, Home Depot and Walmart. This year, however, there’s been a 27% increase in the amount of Halloween home merchandise online, and a 61% increase in Halloween costumes and accessories, as Refinitiv discovered in a collaboration with StyleSage. Moreover, October to-date, 10% of the Halloween apparel online is completely sold out. Although Halloween merchandise has been selling out faster this year, luckily for procrastinators, there still seems to be more Halloween items available

News of a potential vaccine last week provided a glimpse of hope that the world can return to some level of normalcy in 2021.  The announcement from Pfizer on November 9th sent the Russell 1000 to a new all-time high of 2,000.69 on November 13th. Markets saw an aggressive rotation into value stocks.  The Russell 1000 Value index saw a 5.6% gain last week, in comparison to a -1.3% loss for the Russell 1000 Growth index.  This resulted in the value index outperforming the growth index by 6.9 percentage points for the week ending November 13th. Using Refinitiv Datastream, we

The StarMine team has published the most recent StarMine Monthly Performance Report which looks at how certain stock market factors performed in September.  We observed a sharp reversal between momentum and value, where value has significantly outperformed momentum across all regions.  This is noteworthy as momentum has been outperforming value across most regions over the last 12 months. As shown in Exhibit 1, momentum is represented by the Analyst Revision Model and Price Momentum model.  Value, which identifies both expensive and undervalued companies, is represented by the Relative Valuation and Intrinsic Valuation model.  Exhibit 2 also highlights this picture, where

When 178-year-old British travel company Thomas Cook failed on Sept. 23, 2019, thousands of travelers were covered by Air Travel Organizers’ Licensing (ATOL), an insurance plan that covered people who purchased package holidays and flights. In addition, the British Civil Aviation Authority executed the largest peacetime repatriation in the nation’s history, bringing back home 150,000 Britons. Investors, of course, were not so fortunate. The safe arrival of their capital is not protected. However, there were indicators before the company’s collapse that rough weather was ahead. StarMine by Refinitiv offers a range of alpha-generating stock selection models in addition to a

In recent years, passive investment through indices has been growing significantly, and investors’ interest in index mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has dramatically increased. According to the Investment Company Institute, “from 2007 through 2016, index domestic equity mutual funds and ETFs received $1.4 trillion in net new cash and reinvested dividends, while actively managed domestic equity mutual funds experienced a net outflow of $1.1 trillion.” 1 With the explosive growth in passive ETFs, constructing appropriate investing strategies using these ETFs is more important now than ever. StarMine has created a number of unique and highly effective quantitative equity alpha