Risk and return of short-duration equity investments

We analyze short-duration equity investments using traded claims on index dividends. We show that investment strategies with constant short maturity outperform a systematic long position in the underlying equity index on a risk-adjusted basis and in absolute terms. Furthermore, we find higher international diversification benefits for this strategy, compared to traditional equity indices. We relate the observed outperformance to market downside exposure, in particular an options-based downside risk factor. We use three alternative models to extract ex-ante risk premia implied in the prices of dividend derivatives and find evidence for substantial time variation in expected returns.