Lazy Prices Short
In plain terms
The short side of 'lazy prices': firms that rewrote their 10-K heavily YoY underperform by 188 bps/month. Most of the lazy-prices alpha lives on this short leg.
How it works
Firms rewriting 10-K sections year-on-year signal regime change. Cohen et al. find shorting 'changers' yields up to 188bps/month — the asymmetry is strong: most alpha lives in the SHORT leg. Adds section-resolved diff (Item 1A risk-factors, Item 7 MD&A) over whole-document cosine.
Live results
0 times picked on its own · 8 times inside a blend (7 beat the stock) · updated 2026-06-06Data dependencies
- SEC filing similarity (extended)
Document-cosine similarity between successive 10-K / 10-Q filings.
- SEC filings sections
10-K / 10-Q / 8-K cleaned text + section maps.
Expected edge
- Reported return
- ~188 bps/month short-leg underperformance (Cohen-Malloy-Nguyen 2020)
- Tested over
- 1995-2014
22% ann. long-short in Cohen et al.; doubles current long-only edge
Example tickers where this is likely to fire
Illustrative only, the signal fires based on the live data, not a fixed list.
Related families
If a company's 10-K barely changes year-over-year, the business is boring-and-steady and outperforms. Big text changes signal hidden bad news.
When managers' call language gets harder to read (rising Fog index) Q/Q, they're hiding bad news. Predicts 12-month underperformance.
Explore Lazy Prices Short on alphactor.ai
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