Simpler Better Market Betas

Abstract

This paper proposes a robust one-pass estimator that is easy to code: Justified by the market-model itself and using a prior that market-betas should not be less than –2 and more than +4, the market-model is run on daily stock rates of return that have first been winsorized at –2 and +4 times the contemporaneous market rate of return. The resulting “slope-winsorized” estimates outperform (all) other known estimators in predicting the future OLS market-beta (on R2 metrics). Adding reasonable age decay, suggesting a half-life of about 3 to 5 months, to observations entering the market-model further improves it. The estimates outpredict the Vasicek estimates by about half as much as the Vasicek estimates outpredict the OLS estimates.