Momentum's founding paper, Jegadeesh and Titman (1993), is taken apart to its winner-minus-loser spread and tested against beta, size, industry, costs and chance in GB792 Unit 2. Searches like "gb 792 unit 2 assignment example", "gb792 unit 2 sample" and "gb792 unit 2 example" land here.
What a finished GB792 Unit 2 empirical study critique looks like
Seven pages under a full citation: Jegadeesh, N., and Titman, S. (1993), Returns to buying winners and selling losers, Journal of Finance, 48(1). Part one restates the claim in a sentence and gives the design exactly: NYSE and AMEX stocks from 1965 to 1989, ranked on returns over three to twelve months, sorted into deciles, the top bought and the bottom sold, held three to twelve months, with and without a one-week gap before holding begins. Part two isolates the central comparison. Part three runs five rival explanations against it, each phrased as an outcome the paper's own tables could confirm or refute. Part four weighs economic magnitude after trading costs, and a closing paragraph states what the evidence supports and where the authors' interpretation reaches past it.
How a GB792 Unit 2 example is structured
Order mirrors a referee report: claim, design, identification, rivals, magnitude, inference. Design gets unusual space because sixteen formation and holding combinations were tested, and anyone weighing chance needs that count before seeing a t-statistic. The critique notes fairly that nearly all sixteen were profitable, which blunts the worry. Its central section argues that the contribution rests on the spread between extreme deciles, so every rival must explain that spread specifically. Beta fails on the paper's own evidence, since losers carried higher betas than winners. Bid-ask bounce is answered by the skipped week. Size and industry concentration remain open, the second taken up later by Moskowitz and Grinblatt. Trading costs are argued as a question of magnitude rather than existence. January gets a paragraph to itself, because the strategy lost money in that month across the sample.
One spread carries the paper
Top decile minus bottom decile, formed on past returns. Every conclusion about underreaction depends on that difference, so the critique names it before discussing anything else.
Sixteen strategies, one headline
Four formation lengths crossed with four holding lengths gives sixteen tests. Almost all were profitable, and the critique credits that before asking why one pairing is featured.
Betas pointing the wrong way
Losers carried higher market betas than winners, so adjusting for market risk widens the spread instead of closing it. That rival fails on the authors' own tables.
Size and industry left open
Losers skew smaller, and extreme returns cluster by industry. Neither is fully controlled, and later industry-momentum evidence suggests the second mattered a great deal.
A January the story must absorb
The zero-cost portfolio lost heavily in January throughout the sample. Underreaction alone predicts no calendar pattern, so the critique leaves it marked as unresolved.
Where marks go in GB792 Unit 2
Critiques that retell the finding and praise its influence read as literature summaries, the failure these papers are graded hardest on. Rivals listed without predictions draw comment as well: saying momentum might be risk, with no statement of what the betas would then look like, gives a reader nothing to check against the tables. Candidates who claim transaction costs erase the profits, citing one later study as if it settled the matter, overstate a contested literature. Errors in the design description are marked precisely, such as omitting the skipped week or calling the portfolios quintiles. Statistical significance treated as economic importance, missing volume and page numbers in the citation, and a conclusion stronger than the rivals section supports account for the smaller deductions applied here.
Get a GB792 Unit 2 example written to your instructions
Which published finance paper has your section assigned? Pass along the article itself, or just the citation, plus the Unit 2 prompt and rubric. The finished critique restates the design exactly, names the central comparison and sets every rival explanation up as a testable prediction. A first custom sample is prepared at no charge and turned around in 24-48h as a rule.
GB792 Unit 2 questions, answered
Is it fair to critique a paper using evidence published after it?
Yes, if the critique keeps two judgments apart. Whether the design answered its own question is judged on what the authors could have done in 1993. Whether the interpretation has held up can draw on later work, such as industry momentum or cost studies. This sample labels which paragraphs make which judgment, so hindsight is never mistaken for a design flaw.
How much of the paper's statistics does the critique reproduce?
None, in most sections. What matters is reading the tables correctly: what a monthly return on a zero-cost portfolio means, why overlapping holding periods affect standard errors, and which columns report risk-adjusted figures. A strong critique explains those readings in plain terms instead of rerunning the estimation, and this sample does exactly that throughout its design section.
Why focus on one comparison rather than the whole paper?
Because a paper's evidence usually rests on a single contrast, with everything else serving as robustness around it. Here that contrast is the extreme-decile spread. A critique spreading attention evenly across every table tends to miss the rival explanation that matters most, while one anchored on the central comparison can test each rival against exactly what it must explain.