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Burton G. Malkiel is the Chemical Bank Chairman’s Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He previously worked in the investment banking division of Smith Barney & Co. and has served as a director of several large investment institutions, including The Vanguard Group and The Prudential Insurance Company of America. He was also appointed as a member of the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers. In both academic and investment circles, he is a highly respected and influential figure.

This strategy is based on tracking the flow of so-called "smart money" in the market, referring to the positions of the three major institutional investors in Taiwan: foreign investors, investment trusts, and proprietary traders. The strategy assumes that when these three institutions hold a strong and consistent view of the market direction, following their lead has a higher probability of success.

Market makers, equipped with high-frequency trading capabilities, institutional-grade cost structures, and real-time creation/redemption privileges, are the primary participants in ETF premium–discount arbitrage. In contrast, Non-Institutional Participants face multiple constraints—including information latency and higher transaction frictions—which make it difficult to capture arbitrage opportunities promptly or profitably. 

LazyBear is a highly influential indicator developer on the internationally renowned trading platform, TradingView. He has created a large number of popular custom technical indicators, and his open-source code has inspired countless quantitative traders and technical analysis enthusiasts around the world. LazyBear's indicators often focus on reducing the lag of traditional indicators and incorporate unique market observations to better capture trends and momentum. One of his representative works, the "Impulse MACD," is adopted here. This indicator is not a traditional Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD), but rather a significantly improved version. It uses a zero-lag Double Exponential Moving Average (DEMA) to respond more quickly to price changes and combines a smoothed high-low price channel (SMMA) to determine market "impulse." The core idea is that trading signals are more valuable only when price momentum aligns with the trend direction. This helps to filter out some of the noise typically found in ranging markets.

The concept of the Moving Average (MA) originates from the Dow Theory developed in the early 20th century. Dow Theory emphasizes that markets exhibit trends, and such trends can be observed through price movements themselves. From the Simple Moving Average (SMA) and Exponential Moving Average (EMA) to more sophisticated variants such as the Double Exponential Moving Average (DEMA) and Hull Moving Average (HMA), all these improvements aim to address the inherent lag problem of traditional moving averages, allowing them to reflect price trends more quickly or more smoothly.

In the Taiwan stock market, credit trading (margin buying and short selling) serves as a critical mechanism for observing market leverage and investor sentiment. Unlike institutional investors with ample capital, retail investors often face capital constraints and therefore resort to margin buying to  increase their purchasing power. Consequently, margin data serves as a key barometer for retail trading heat.  Key indicators for monitoring credit trading include daily margin/short volume, balance, margin utilization rates, and—most crucially—the Margin Maintenance Ratio (MMR).  The MMR is a core metric used to assess the risk status of margin accounts and determine how close investors are to a margin call. Brokers set specific MMR thresholds to mitigate default risks during periods of high market volatility.

In financial markets, Contrary Thinking is a timeless strategic wisdom. It stems from a simple yet profound observation: when most people are overly optimistic, the market is often overheated; when the crowd falls into fear, it may actually present a buying opportunity. However, contrarian investing has long remained at the level of a proverb, lacking concrete and quantifiable standards of action, making it difficult to implement in practice.

Gabriel Watson  is a well-known American growth-momentum portfolio manager. In his early career, he worked at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and William O’Neil & Co., where he accumulated extensive market research experience. Since joining Black Rose Capital Management in 1998, Watson has broken away from the confines of traditional value investing and developed a systematic, rule-based stock-picking method centered on “revenue momentum and price strength.” He calls this framework “The Machine.” In an environment characterized by rapid information flow and swift capital rotation, this approach has enabled him to capture the powerful upward moves of leading stocks.

In the previous study, we examined the Capital Gain Overhang (CGO) factor, designed to capture the behavioral bias known as the Disposition Effect. By measuring the gap between current market prices and investors’ average cost basis, CGO quantifies unrealized gains and losses at the market level. Empirical tests in Taiwan’s equity market confirmed that CGO is a meaningful predictor of future returns: high-CGO stocks consistently outperformed low-CGO stocks, generating significant positive alpha beyond standard Fama–French models, especially over medium- to long-term horizons.