Simply Better Market Betas
38 Pages Posted: 6 May 2019 Last revised: 22 Jun 2021
There are 2 versions of this paper
Simply Better Market Betas
Simpler Better Market Betas
Date Written: june 13, 2021
Abstract
This paper introduces a robust and easy-to-implement one-pass market- beta estimator. It only requires first winsorizing daily stock rates of return at –2 and +4 times the contemporaneous market rate of return. In predicting future market-betas, this “slope-winsorized” beta estimator predicts future betas better not only than OLS betas, Bloomberg betas (ubiquitous on finan- cial websites), and Vasicek (1973) betas, but also published estimators that require intra-day data, super-computers, or financial statements. Moreover, using WLS to exponentially decay the weight of aged return observations (with a half-life of about four months) further improves the estimates.
Keywords: market-beta, robust estimation, winsorization
JEL Classification: G11, C58
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation