Alpha Architect, LLC
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Founded in 2010, the Alpha Architect mission is to empower investors through education.
We are a research-intensive asset management firm with a focus on high-conviction value and momentum factor exposures.
We seek to deliver “Affordable Alpha,” which means highly differentiated investment strategies at lower costs, thereby giving sophisticated investors a higher chance of winning, net of fees and taxes. We currently offer Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), Separately Managed Accounts (SMAs), and ETF White-label services.
Our core beliefs are as follows: 1) Transparency, 2) Evidence-Based Investing, 3) Systematic Decision Making, and 4) Win-Win client relationships.
The firm is based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. We are a service-disabled and minority-owned firm. Source
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| Scope | Local |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Country | United States of America |
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Recent Articles
Search Articles351 ETFs: Tax-Free “Diversification” Is Supposed to Hurt
Co-authored by Wes Gray, PhD (Alpha Architect) and Robert Elwood (Practus, LLP). On July 21, 2026, at the Wall Street Tax Association (WSTA) tax-geek meeting, Treasury announced that it may put certain types of Section 351 transfers to ETFs on a list of transactions that may look “too good to be true.” Cue the media’s panic headlines. Of course, the problem with media companies is that they have economic incentives to focus on clicks, but they don’t care about context.
What Daily Stock Returns Tell Us About the Economy
||Categories: Research Insights, Factor Investing, Larry Swedroe, Other Insights, Macroeconomics Research| One of the most enduring puzzles in finance is the apparent disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street—markets sometimes soar while the underlying economy stumbles, and vice versa.
Skewness as a Hidden Driver of Anomaly Returns
Behavioral finance research has established that investors dislike negative skewness because it exposes them to rare but severe losses, while they embrace positive skewness because it offers the chance of occasional outsized gains — the lottery-like appeal that persists even when expected payoffs are modest. In behavioral models, this preference for positively skewed assets bids up their prices, depressing future expected returns.
Two Accounting Anomalies: One May Be Risk, the Other Is Mispricing
Two of the longest-running puzzles in accounting and asset pricing research are the accrual anomaly and the post-earnings-announcement drift, or PEAD. Both describe return patterns that standard one-period asset pricing models struggle to explain, and both have generated a huge literature. The recurring question has been the same: is the market mispricing the information, or is it rationally pricing risk that one-period models may miss?
Can AI tools help find the needle in the corporate filing haystack?
||Categories: Research Insights, Larry Swedroe, AI and Machine Learning, Other Insights| Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the investment landscape in ways that extend far beyond algorithmic trading and robo-advisors. One of AI’s most promising applications lies in its ability to process and extract meaning from vast amounts of unstructured text—something that even the most diligent human investors struggle to do at scale.
Retail Investors and the Mispricing Puzzle
Institutional investors are frequently spoken of in the finance literature as “smart money” while retail investors are considered “noise traders” who suffer from a variety of behavioral biases and cognitive errors, and as less equipped to do meaningful research.
Revaluation Alpha: Why Past Factor Returns May Be Misleading
Robert Arnott, Sina Ehsani, Campbell Harvey, and Omid Shakernia, authors of the September 2025 study “Revaluation Alpha,” examined how much of a factor’s historical returns have been derived from changes in valuation levels (“revaluation alpha”). Their hypothesis was that this return component is typically nonrecurring, making it dangerous to extrapolate historical returns as indicators of future results.
Taming the Anomaly Zoo: How Macroeconomic Forces Shape Market Returns
The central and unfinished task of absolute pricing is to understand and measure the sources of aggregate or macroeconomic risk that drive asset prices.—John Cochrane Imagine walking into a zoo filled with hundreds of mysterious creatures—each one promising extraordinary rewards but defying conventional explanation.
what traditional measures leave to be desired
||Categories: Predicting Market Returns, Research Insights, Larry Swedroe, Trend Following, Other Insights| “Buy the dip” (BTD) has become one of the most popular investment mantras of recent years, especially since the COVID-19 market recovery in 2020. The strategy seems intuitive: when markets fall, buy at a discount and wait for the inevitable rebound. However, BTD is not foolproof.
Rethinking Growth Investing: Why Traditional Growth Indices Miss the Mark
Historically, the finance community (both academics and investment firms) has divided stocks into two categories: cheap and expensive. Initially, the book-to-price ratio was used to allocate stocks into growth (expensive) or value (cheap) indices. Other metrics, such as price-to-earnings, price-to-sales, and price-to-cash flow, are now also commonly used.