After years in what can be now called one of the worst (if not the worst) period for value investing, many investors have packed their bags and called it quits. We’ve heard this be said over and over again; and yet, many of their arguments look extremely compelling. So are they in the right? Let's examine.
The size effect is alive and well, but it's more nuanced than we once thought. Rather than viewing it as a simple "small beats large" phenomenon, we should understand size as a critical dimension that shapes how effectively other investment factors perform.
Diversification is the only free lunch in investing. If you’ve spent even a day exploring the world of finance, you’ve likely encountered this common truism. But chances are, you’ve also heard stories of someone turning a small stake into millions by going all-in on just one or two stocks. That contrast raises a natural question for many investors: how many stocks should I actually own in my portfolio? Too many stocks, and you might be leaving opportunities on the table. Too few and you risk losing your shirt! So how do we strike a balance?
If you’re a factor investor, there will come a time where you will have to choose between mom and dad: Should you combine or separate your factor exposures? And make no mistake: You will have to make a decision! While there’s no right answer, the way you structure your portfolio can have significant implications for returns, costs, and even your own behavior as an investor. Let’s walk through the logic behind both approaches.
Let’s break down how to build a robust factor portfolio—without getting lost in the weeds. We investigate which equity factors have the strongest historical returns and diversification benefits from a long-only perspective.
An efficient way to improve the expected performance of an equity strategy would be to systematically exclude penny stocks, as well with high asset growth and extreme past returns, especially if they have low profitability (and exclude funds that don’t screen out such stocks).
Antonello Cirulli and Patrick Walker, authors of the December 2023 study “Outperforming Equal Weighting,” examined whether equally weighted portfolios could be enhanced by avoiding negative exposure to some of the most prominent factor anomalies documented in asset pricing literature.
The empirical research findings demonstrate that the return premium generated by being long low-distress risk stocks and short high-distress risk stocks is persistent and that the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the Fama-French three-factor models cannot explain it. Hence, we have the distress puzzle, or anomaly.
When a small subset of companies makes up a large portion of a portfolio, for better or worse their returns will have a greater impact on overall portfolio results.
Given that tightening monetary policy increases economic risks, Simpson and Grossman provided compelling evidence of a risk explanation for the size factor. For those investors who engage in tactical asset allocation strategies (market timing), their evidence suggests that it might be possible to exploit the information. Before jumping to that conclusion, I would caution that because markets are forward-looking, they should anticipate periods of Fed tightening and the heightened risks of small stocks.
How well do quantitative investors navigate around the changes to the accounting standards that are endemic to the financial data used in quantitative strategies? The numbers reported on financial statements are wholly governed by regulation and by each firm’s interpretation of those accounting standards. So how do quants stick to their empirical evidence on old data methods or do they react in terms of the strategy when the change in standards is material?
Using data on 65,000 stocks from 23 countries, they evaluated the performance of the Fama-French factors, examining the factor premia in global markets to verify their robustness across different company size categories and geographical regions. Their data sample covered the period 1987-2019.
In his famous 1981 paper, "The Relationship Between Return and Market Value of Common Stocks,” Rolf Banz found that small firms have higher risk-adjusted returns [...]
The lack of a statistically significant size premium in the U.S. since the publication of Rolf Banz’s 1981 paper, “The Relationship Between Return and Market [...]
In my role as chief research officer for the Buckingham Family of Financial Services, I receive many questions from investors and advisors alike, asking me [...]
From 2017 through 2019, the Russell 1000 Growth Index returned 20.5 percent per annum, outperforming the Russell 1000 Value Index, which returned 9.7 percent, by [...]
The Size Premium in Equity Markets: Where Is the Risk? Stefano Ciliberti, Emmanuel Sérié, Guillaume Simon, Yves Lempérière, and Jean-Philippe BouchaudJournal of Portfolio ManagementA version [...]
Fact, Fiction and the Size Effect Ron Alquist, Ronen Israel, And Tobias MoskowitzJournal of Portfolio Management, 2018A version of this paper can be found hereWant to [...]
In the great book and series Game of Thrones, the inhabitants of the Iron Islands have a saying "What is Dead May Never Die" which [...]
As the chief research officer for Buckingham Strategic Wealth and The BAM Alliance, I’m often asked, after any asset class or factor experiences a period [...]
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