Thursday, January 6, 2011

Vice Pays Better than the Stock Market (VICEX)

We've been tracking sin stocks since 2007's "Moral Judgment On 'Sin Stocks' Means Higher Returns For Vice-Friendly Investors":
That's the headline of a press release from the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business announcing the release of a draft paper by the school's Prof. Marcin Kacperczyk and Princeton Economics Prof. Harrison Hong.

Prof. Hong lists his research interests as:
"Asset pricing with less-than-fully-rational investors; differences of opinion, short-sales constraints and asset prices; social interaction and financial markets; career concerns, biased forecasts and security analysts; organization, performance and mutual funds; asset pricing with asymmetric information and other market imperfections."

Hey! Mine too!
Professor Hong has put together a pretty impressive c.v. including associate editor at the Journal of Finance and a Directorship of the American Finance Association.
Quick joke:
We're from the ATF
What's that?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
Sounds like a party, come on in.
We use the Vice Fund as a proxy for the gambling, boozing, smoking and shooting stocks, here's the latest one year comparison vs. the S&P 500, from BigCharts: