Jianhua Z. Huang

This book shows that the stock market returns of hundreds of anomaly portfolios discovered by researchers in finance over the past three decades can be explained by a recent asset pricing model dubbed the ZCAPM. Anomaly portfolios are long/short portfolio returns on stocks that cannot be explained by asset pricing models, and their number has been steadily increasing into the hundreds. Since asset pricing models cannot explain them, behavioral theories have become popular to account for anomalies. Unlike the efficient market hypothesis that assumes rational investors, these human psychology-based theories emphasize irrational investor behavior. This book collects and analyzes a large database of U. S. stock returns for anomaly portfolios over a long sample period spanning approximately 60 years. The authors overview different asset pricing models that have attempted to explain anomalous portfolio returns in the stock market. They then provide a theoretical and empirical discussion of a new asset pricing model dubbed the ZCAPM and report compelling empirical evidence that reveals the ZCAPM can explain hundreds of anomalies. Implications to the efficient-markets/behavioral-finance controversy are discussed. The book will be of particular interest to researchers, students, and professors of capital markets, asset management, and financial economics alongside professionals.

This book proposes a new capital asset pricing model dubbed the ZCAPM that outperforms other popular models in empirical tests using US stock returns. The ZCAPM is derived from Fischer Black’s well-known zero-beta CAPM, itself a more general form of the famous capital asset pricing model (CAPM) by 1990 Nobel Laureate William Sharpe and others. It is widely accepted that the CAPM has failed in its theoretical relation between market beta risk and average stock returns, as numerous studies have shown that it does not work in the real world with empirical stock return data. The upshot of the CAPM’s failure is that many new factors have been proposed by researchers. However, the number of factors proposed by authors has steadily increased into the hundreds over the past three decades. This new ZCAPM is a path-breaking asset pricing model that is shown to outperform popular models currently in practice in finance across different test assets and time periods. Since asset pricing is central to the field of finance, it can be broadly employed across many areas, including investment analysis, cost of equity analyses, valuation, corporate decision making, pension portfolio management, etc. The ZCAPM represents a revolution in finance that proves the CAPM as conceived by Sharpe and others is alive and well in a new form, and will certainly be of interest to academics, researchers, students, and professionals of finance, investing, and economics.