Factor Investing

Are Short Covering Trades Informative?

The importance of the role played by short sellers has received increasing academic attention in recent years. Short sellers help keep market prices efficient by preventing overpricing and the formation of price bubbles in financial markets. Market efficiency is important because an efficient market allocates capital efficiently. If short sellers were inhibited from expressing their views on valuations, securities prices could become overvalued and excess capital would be allocated to those firms.

Compression: Can the Value Spread Expand Forever?

We believe owning deep-value stocks is potentially interesting at these valuation peaks. But as I said in the previous two times I wrote this, the spread can get more extreme. At some point, we'd like to stop talking about the valuation spread and its potential effect on forward expected returns...and see that spread COMPRESS!

Intangibles and the Value Factor

This figure shows the long, short and long-short leg performance of the intangible value factor in comparison to the traditional value factor. The performance is shown for each of the four regions: U.S., Europe, Japan and Asia Pacific between June 1983 and December 2021. The monthly returns are ex-post volatility scaled to 5% p.m

Does International Diversification Work?

In this article, the authors examine the research on the benefits of international diversification. Some argue that because equity markets generally crash simultaneously, there are no benefits to having equity diversification. The evidence from this paper rejects this hypothesis.

How Pervasive is Corporate Fraud?

In this article, we examine the research on the pervasiveness of corporate fraud (misconduct or alleged fraud), which is one of the (less emphasized) costs of public ownership.

It’s Always Darkest Just Before Dawn

Wide divergences between the valuations of cheap stocks relative to expensive stocks have preceded significant outperformance for value over the subsequent decade, as shown in this figure.

Should investors be indifferent to dividend impact on stock returns?

In their 1961 paper, “Dividend Policy, Growth, and the Valuation of Shares,” Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani famously established that dividend policy should be irrelevant to stock returns. As they explained it, at least before frictions like trading costs and taxes, investors should be indifferent to $1 in the form of a dividend (causing the stock price to drop by $1) and $1 received by selling shares. This must be true, unless you believe that $1 isn’t worth $1. This theorem has not been challenged since, at least in the academic community.

Mitigating Risks with Factor Strategies

The following exhibit, which is useful to the subject of mitigating risks with factor strategies, provides the total return of the four benchmark portfolios and the five anomaly portfolios.

The Value Factor and Deleveraging

How do you separate the signal from the noise? To have confidence that a factor premium, or strategy, isn’t just the result of data mining - a lucky/random outcome - we recommended that you should require evidence that the premium has been not only persistent over long periods of time and across economic regimes, but also pervasive across sectors, countries, geographic regions and even asset classes; robust to various definitions (for example, there has been both a value and a momentum premium using many different metrics); survives transactions costs; and has intuitive risk- or behavioral-based explanations for the premium to persist.

Automation and Asset Pricing Theory

In this article about asset pricing theory, we examine the research on the impact of technological advances that displace human labor in favor of machine capital to asset pricing.

The Performance of Multi-Factor Long-Short Portfolios in Various Economic Regimes

To determine if a multi-factor approach has provided diversification benefits in terms of exposure to economic cycle risks, the research team at Counterpoint evaluated returns to multifactor long-short strategies, stocks, and 1-month T-bills in a variety of economic conditions (recession or no recession, high or no high inflation, and stagflation) over the period July 1963-August 2022.

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