How should be equity factor strategies implemented? In a long-only (smart beta) way? As a long-short strategy, as most of the hedge funds usually do? Or in a partially-hedged fashion by going long equity factor and shorting market to offset some of the market risks? There is no one universal answer as it depends on the investment mandate and constraints of each fund manager contemplating to implement factor investing strategies. But recent academic paper written by Benaych-Georges, Bouchaud and Ciliberti suggests that it’s a good idea to go in the direction of long-short implementation (if it’s possible). Managing short book can be challenging; however, the added benefit of lower correlation among strategies gives resultant factor portfolio a significant boost in the return-to-risk ratio (even after accounting for realistic implementation and shorting costs).

Authors: Benaych-Georges, Bouchaud, Ciliberti

Title: Equity Factors: To Short Or Not To Short, That is the Question

There are very few observations of the attributes of financial markets that are considered by most of the investors as nearly permanent facts. One of the most often cited examples is that over the long interval stocks outperform bonds. But is it really such truth? Over how long interval? 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? As the new and better historical data are becoming available for analysis, they show interesting findings. Let’s show one example. There exist one very long interval during which the return of stocks was nearly equal to bonds. What do you think is the length of such an interval in the case of the US? It’s 150 years! Yes, that’s correct, there was a one-and-half-century long period in the history of the United States when the performance of stocks and bonds was nearly identical. We do not imply that it will be the case in the 21st century. But an important research paper written by Edward McQuarrie shows that investors must prepare for even the most unexpected possibilities when they are making their asset allocation decisions.

Author: McQuarrie

Title: The US Bond Market before 1926: Investor Total Return from 1793, Comparing Federal, Municipal and Corporate Bonds Part II: 1857 to 1926

Nearly two months ago, in a time of the highest turmoil during the current pandemic crisis, we performed a quick assessment of the status of performance of equity factor strategies. The world has still not been able to ward-off health-care crisis completely, but a lot of countries have made significant progress (on the other hand, there are still a lot of countries in a worse state than a few months ago). Equity indexes have rebounded from the March lows and have removed some of the losses. Therefore, we have received multiple inquiries about the current situation of equity factor strategies.

So it may be a good time to revisit once again how they are performing.

Global interest in alternative datasets is growing strongly. We at Quantpedia are looking on this emerging trend with curiosity too.

We are happy to announce Quantpedia’s cooperation with DDQIR, an alternative data-driven quantitative research company, which maintains an extensive database of alternative data providers. Their PHUMA Platform contains information about the majority of available alternative datasets and detailed characterization offers the possibility for the in-depth data-discovery process. DDQIR will operate a simplified demo of their tool for us on a separate Quantpedia’s sub-page.

Socially Responsible Investing (also called ESG Factor Investing) grows in popularity. More and more investors enter the stock market not just to invest their savings, but they are also want to support companies that bring positive social or environmental change. ESG factor investing can bring satisfaction to those investors. But does it also brings a real outperformance in a financial sense? Is there some ESG factor alpha? How big is it? These are some of the questions we have decided to investigate – we obtained data, identified ESG factor strategies and tested them. Feel free to explore them with us…

April was more business-as-usual month for Quantpedia team as eleven new Quantpedia Premium strategies have been added into our database, and six new related research papers have been included in existing Premium strategies during last month.

Additionally, we have produced 17 new backtests written in QuantConnect code. Our database currently contains over 270 strategies with out-of-sample backtests/codes.

Also, five new blog posts you may find interesting have been published on our Quantpedia blog: