Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Sin is In: Vice Beats the S&P 500

A quasi-periodic look at the wages of sin.

We first examined the profit to be had by being naughty back in April 2007:
Moral Judgment On 'Sin Stocks' Means Higher Returns For Vice-Friendly Investors

...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. He hangs his hat at Princeton.

One proxy is the Vice fund, first mentioned in 2007 and again in 2008.
Here's the one year comparison chart, from Yahoo Finance:

Chart forVice (VICEX)

Here are the funds' holdings.