Academics are often called out of touch or cloistered, and are condemned for pursuing research that’s irrelevant to daily life. New research, however, points to a powerful exception:

Simply by publishing an academic paper, a professor can demolish your investment strategy.

Buy stocks that recently did well, focus on firms that reinvest profits—it doesn’t matter. If a finance scholar writes about your strategy, over the next decade or so your returns will shrink by more than one-third.

That’s true for 82 different strategies that have been described in finance journals, say David McLean, a visiting associate professor of finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, and Jeffrey Pontiff, a professor of finance at Boston College. The duo describe their findings in a working paper that has been presented at several finance conferences this year…

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