Editor’s note: This was originally published as a series of posts at SynchronicityFutures.com. The original posts are available here. What a run…US Treasuries 10 Year US Treasury Notes – why do we care? • Foreign countries own quite a bit of our debt – http://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt • The Fed owns quite a bit of our debt – https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TREAST • Domestic institutions own quite a bit of our debt (mutual funds, baking institutions, insurance companies, state and local governments, and pension funds) – SIFMA Although not a perfect correlation, the 10 year rate does have some effect on certain fixed mortgage rates. And mortgage rates have some effect on home prices (though other variable like wage growth and inflation have a say as well) So, treasuries are important because: • We have huge players that own a ton of treasuries and • Treasuries have an important impact on the housing market. Let’s look, then, at a long-term vista of the 10 Year Treasury Rate

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at AlphaArchitect.com and is another example of recent behavioral finance research. To learn more, please visit AlphaArchitect.com. Momentum is the tendency for assets that have performed well (poorly) in the recent past to continue to perform well (poorly) in the future, at least for a short period of time. In 1997, Mark Carhart, in his study “On Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance,” was the first academic to use momentum, together with the three Fama-French factors (market beta, size and value), to explain mutual fund returns. Robert Levy published one of the earliest formal studies on crosssectional momentum in 1967, but the real academic interest for momentum (a form of technical analysis) was inspired by Narasimhan Jegadeesh and Sheridan Titman, authors of the 1993 study “Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency.” The academic literature has investigated the existence and performance

Editor’s note: This paper was originally published at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.00634.pdf. It is reprinted here as an example of recent work in behavioral finance. Abstract: We first review empirical evidence that asset prices have had episodes of large fluctuations and been inefficient for at least 200 years. We briefly review recent theoretical results as well as the neurological basis of trend following and finally argue that these asset price properties can be attributed to two fundamental mechanisms that have not changed for many centuries: an innate preference for trend following and the collective tendency to exploit as much as possible detectable price arbitrage, which leads to destabilizing feedback loops. 1 Introduction According to mainstream economics, financial markets should be both efficient and stable.  Efficiency means that the current asset price is an unbiased estimator of its fundamental value (aka “right”, “fair” or “true”) price. As a consequence, no trading strategy may yield statistically abnormal profits