Academic Finance Research and Insights

Value and Momentum Investing -- our two favorite factors. We talk about these phenomena on our blog all the time, and have given both rational and behavioral explanations as to why these may occur. However, very few in the finance community are direct investors into Value and Momentum securities -- the individual stocks (or bonds) themselves. Many use ETFs or mutual funds to gain access to these factors. Institutions generally do the same, either investing in hedge funds or managed accounts. This is delegated asset management, whereby one delegates the decision of the security selection onto a third-party manager. A by-product of delegation is that from time to time, the third-party manager must be assessed. While many may claim the process is most important, the performance is always taken into consideration. So what happens to a Value manager who is overweight the wrong industry? While the manager may be following the same process discussed ex-ante, the ex-post assessment may be that the manager needs to be fired due to underperformance.