The Active Share Debate: AQR versus the Academics

There is an interesting discussion in the geeky world of academic finance literature between the intellectual muscle at AQR and academia.

The discussion revolves around the following question: “Does Active Share matter?” This is an important topic for active ETFs and Mutual Funds in the marketplace.

The original paper on this measure was written by Cremers and Petajisto and was published in the Review of Financial Studies in 2009 (top finance journal). Links to the paper can be found here and here. The abstract of the paper is the following:

We introduce a new measure of active portfolio management, Active Share, which represents the share of portfolio holdings that differ from the benchmark index holdings. We compute Active Share for domestic equity mutual funds from 1980 to 2003. We relate Active Share to fund characteristics such as size, expenses, and turnover in the cross-section, and we also examine its evolution over time. Active Share predicts fund performance: funds with the highest Active Share significantly outperform their benchmarks, both before and after expenses, and they exhibit strong performance persistence. Nonindex funds with the lowest Active Share underperform their benchmarks.

Main Finding of the paper: For non-index funds, the higher the active share, the better the performance. We tend to agree, as we have talked about diworsification in the past. However, just because a manager creates a more active portfolio (a necessary condition for outperformance), this doesn’t imply an active manager will actually have outperformance. The team at AQR (Frazzini, Friedman, and Pomorski), in a forthcoming article in the Financial Analyst Journal (link to the paper is here), address this question.  The abstract is the following:

We investigate Active Share, a measure meant to determine the level of active management in investment portfolios. Using the same sample as Cremers and Petajisto (2009) and Petajisto (2013) we find that Active Share correlates with benchmark returns, but does not predict actual fund returns; within individual benchmarks, it is as likely to correlate positively with performance as it is to correlate negatively. Our findings do not support an emphasis on Active Share as a manager selection tool or an appropriate guideline for institutional portfolios.

Main point of the paper: Active share should not be used as a manager selection tool. Basically, for a given index, they find that active share cannot be used as a reliable tool to identify out-performance.

So is Active Share a waste of time?

As Lee Corso says every Saturday morning during College Gameday, “Not so fast!”

The two authors of the original paper, Martijn Cremers and Antti Petajisto were quick to shoot down the AQR findings.

Here is the executive summary from Antti Petajisto:

All of the key claims of AQR’s paper were already addressed in the two cited Active Share papers: Petajisto (2013) and Cremers and Petajisto (2009).

1) The fact about the level of Active Share varying across benchmarks has been widely known for many years. Its performance impact was explicitly studied and discussed in the first drafts of Petajisto (2013) back in 2010, and the performance results remained broadly similar. The reason for the apparent discrepancy is AQR’s choice of summarizing results by benchmark, which effectively gives the same weight to the most popular index (S&P 500, assigned to 870 funds) and the least popular index (Russell 3000 Growth, assigned to 24 funds), which is not sensible as a statistical approach

2) The issue about four-factor alphas varying across benchmark indices does nothing to change the fact that higher Active Share managers have been able to beat their benchmark indices. However, it does raise an interesting point about the four-factor approach to measuring performance, and in fact my coauthors and I wrote a long and detailed paper about this exact issue first in 2007 (published later as Cremers, Petajisto, and Zitzewitz (2013)).

3) AQR’s researchers argue that there is no theory behind Active Share and they remain mystified by the differences between Active Share and tracking error. It is unfortunate that they have entirely missed the lengthy sections of both Active Share papers that discuss this exact topic: pages 74-77 in Petajisto (2013) and sections 1.3, 3.1, and 4.1 in Cremers and Petajisto (2009). The short answer is that Active Share is more about stock selection, whereas tracking error is more about exposure to systematic risk factors. So clearly ignoring large and essential parts of the original Active Share papers is simply not the way to conduct impartial scientific inquiry.

If that executive summary wasn’t scathing enough, Martijn Cremers actually wrote a paper titeld “AQR in Wonderland: Down the Rabbit Hole of ‘Deactivating Active Share’ (and Back Out Again?)“

Here is the abstract:

The April 2015 paper “Deactivating Active Share”, released by AQR Capital Management, aims to debunk the claim that Active Share (a measure of active management) predicts investment performance. The claim of the AQR paper is that “neither theory nor data justify the expectation that Active Share might help investors improve their returns,” arguing that previous results are “entirely driven by the strong correlation between Active Share and the benchmark type.”

This paper’s first and main aim is to establish that the AQR paper should not be interpreted using typical academic standards. Instead, our conjecture is that this AQR paper falls into a wonderfully creative but altogether different genre, which we label the Wonderland Genre, as its main characteristic seems to be “Sentence First, Verdict Later.” For example, the results in the AQR-WP cannot be taken at face value, as the information that is not shared reverses their main conclusion.

Secondarily, we consider the plausible claim that benchmark styles matter and find that controlling for the main benchmark style, the predictability of Active Share is robust. While Active Share is only one tool among many to analyze investment funds and needs to be carefully interpreted for each fund individually, Active Share may indeed plausibly help investors improve their returns.

Thirdly and finally, we impolitely consider why AQR may not be a big fan of Active Share by taking a look at the AQR mutual funds offered to retail investors. We find that these tend to have relatively low Active Shares, have shown little outperformance to date (with performance data ending in 2014) and thus seem fairly expensive given the amount of differentiation they offer.

So who is the winner in the debate?

The answer is both are probably correct at some level. More concentration (less diworsification) probably has higher active share and in the past had higher returns. However, one cannot just take any random selection of stocks and expect to outperform (we show this here), the style of the investment matters, which was AQR’s argument (we prefer Value and Momentum).

Let us know what you think!