Asset Growth Effect

Fundamental reason

Simple trading strategy

Out-of-sample strategy's implementation/validation in QuantConnect's framework(chart, statistics & code)

Source paper

Cooper, Gulen, Schill: The Asset Growth Effect in Stock Returns

Abstract: We document a strong negative relationship between the growth of total firm assets and subsequent firm stock returns using a broad sample of U.S. stocks. Over the past 40 years, low asset growth stocks have maintained a return premium of 20% per year over high asset growth stocks. The asset growth return premium begins in January following the measurement year and persists for up to five years. The firm asset growth rate maintains an economically and statistically important ability to forecast returns in both large capitalization and small capitalization stocks. In the cross-section of stock returns, the asset growth rate maintains large explanatory power with respect to other previously documented determinants of the cross-section of returns (i.e., size, prior returns, book-to-market ratios). We conclude that risk-based explanations have some difficulty in explaining such a large and consistent return premium.

Other papers

• Cooper, Gulen, Schill: Asset Growth and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

  Abstract: We test for firm-level asset investment effects in returns by examining the cross-sectional relation between firm asset growth and subsequent stock returns. As a test variable, we use the year-on-year percentage change in total assets. Asset growth rates are strong predictors of future abnormal returns. Asset growth retains its forecasting ability even on large capitalization stocks, a subgroup of firms for which other documented predictors of the cross-section lose much of their predictive ability. When we compare asset growth rates with the previously documented determinants of the cross-section of returns (i.e., book-to-market ratios, firm capitalization, lagged returns, accruals, and other growth measures), we find that a firm's annual asset growth rate emerges as an economically and statistically significant predictor of the cross-section of U.S. stock returns.

• Watanabe, Xu, Yao, Yu: The Asset Growth Effect: Insights from International Equity Markets

  Abstract: Stocks with higher asset growth rates experience lower future returns in 40 international equity markets, consistent with the U.S. evidence documented by Cooper et al. (2008). This negative effect of asset growth on stock return is stronger in developed markets and in markets where stocks are more efficiently priced. For each country, we estimate a parsimonious model to quantify the cash flow channel and the discount rate channel of the investment-return relationship proposed by the q-theory model of Li, Livdan, and Zhang (2008). The estimated cash flow beta and discount rate beta successfully explain the cross-country variation in the asset growth effect on future stock returns. In contrast, country characteristics related to corporate governance and investor protection, and measures of limits to arbitrage, do not explain such effect. This evidence suggests that the q-theory model does better than mispricing-based hypotheses in explaining the asset growth effect internationally.

• Kam, Wei: Asset Growth Reversals and Investment Anomalies

  Abstract: We simultaneously test the prominent rational and behavioral explanations of the negative relations between corporate asset growth or investments and subsequent stock returns by extensively examining the effects of realized and predicted subsequent growth on the relations. We find: (i) returns on low growth firms with low subsequent growth are not higher than those on high growth firms with high subsequent growth; (ii) high growth firms that have high subsequent growth do not underperform and the return spreads between low and high growth firms are lower when high growth firms have higher subsequent growth; (iii) the relations between growth and returns are weak or even in opposite direction when subsequent growth tend not to reverse but are significantly negative when subsequent growth tend to reverse and are stronger when the reversals are more extreme. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis based on extrapolation and growth-based style investing but less consistent with the other explanations.

• Beneish, Lee, Nichols: In Short Supply: Equity Overvaluation and Short Selling

  Abstract: We use detailed security lending data to examine the relation between short sale constraints and equity overvaluation. We find that stocks’ “special” status exhibits a non‐linear (U‐shaped) relation with their short interest ratio (SIR), and that a stock’s special status, rather than its SIR, predicts negative returns. We show that short‐sellers trade on a variety of firm characteristics and against high sentiment. Specifically, we find: (1) the abnormal returns to the short‐side of nine market ‘anomalies’ identified in prior work are attributable to special stocks; and (2) future negative returns to special stocks are directly related to the lendable inventory in each stock rather than to its shares borrowed. Overall, our results suggest returns to the short side of documented ‘anomalies’ may not be obtainable without significant cost, and that the supply (available inventory) of lendable shares is the primary binding constraint to informational arbitrage in the case of equity overvaluation.

• Fu: What Is behind the Asset Growth and Investment Growth Anomalies?

  Abstract: Existing studies show that firm asset and investment growth predict cross-sectional stock returns. Firms that shrink their assets or investments subsequently earn higher returns than firms that expand their assets or investments. I show that the superior returns of the low asset and investment growth portfolios are due to the omission of delisting returns in CRSP monthly stock return file and that the poor returns of the high asset and investment growth portfolios are largely driven by the subsample of firms that have issued large amounts of debt or equity in the previous year. Controlling for the effects of the delisting bias and external financing, I do not find an independent effect of asset or investment growth on stock returns.

• Fan, Opsal, Yu: Equity Anomalies and Idiosyncratic Risk Around the World

  Abstract: In this study, we examine how idiosyncratic risk is correlated with a wide array of anomalies, including asset growth, book-to-market, investment-to-assets, momentum, net stock issues, size, and total accruals, in international equity markets. We use zero-cost trading strategy and multifactor models to show that these anomalies produce significant abnormal returns. The abnormal returns vary dramatically among different countries and between developed and emerging countries. We provide strong evidence to support the limits of arbitrage theory across countries by documenting a positive correlation between idiosyncratic risk and abnormal return. It suggests that the existence of these well-known anomalies is due to idiosyncratic risk. In addition, we find that idiosyncratic risk has less impact on abnormal return in developed countries than emerging countries. Our results support the mispricing explanation of the existence of various anomalies across global markets.

• Prombutr, Phengpis, Lam: Anatomy of the Mispricing Theory: Evidence from Growth Anomalies

  Abstract: This paper investigates corporate growth anomalies in asset pricing from behavioral perspectives. Cross-sectional analyses indicate that a long-term 3-year investment growth is statistically significant in explaining subsequent stock returns, but the first 1-year growth that is closest to the formation is priced by investors the most, followed by the second and third ones, monotonically. We find that the evidence is driven by myopic mispricing in that investors tend to put more weights on recent information since the evolution of the firm’s prospects around the formation year consistently shows that the growth closest (farthest) to the formation has the most (least) severe mispricing. Further investigations show that the mispricing evolution is directly amplified by limits to arbitrage and that benchmark-adjusted returns on short positions are affected more than those on long positions. However, the farther growth is less sensitive to the limit-to-arbitrage because of the extrapolation is myopic. The asset growth anomaly also shows the same pattern as the investment growth anomaly.

• Lu, Stambaugh, Yuan: Anomalies Abroad: Beyond Data Mining

  Abstract: A pre-specified set of nine prominent U.S. equity return anomalies produce significant alphas in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K. All of the anomalies are consistently significant across these five countries, whose developed stock markets afford the most extensive data. The anomalies remain significant even in a test that assumes their true alphas equal zero in the U.S. Consistent with the view that anomalies reflect mispricing, idiosyncratic volatility exhibits a strong negative relation to return among stocks that the anomalies collectively identify as overpriced, similar to results in the U.S.

• Rizova, Savina and Saito, Namiko: Investment and Expected Stock Returns

  Abstract: Valuation theory predicts that, all else equal, expected investment should be negatively related to expected returns. We study the relation between expected investment and expected stock returns globally. We show that recent asset growth is a systematic proxy for future investment not only in the US, but also in developed ex US and emerging markets. Using this proxy, we find a negative investment effect across developed and emerging markets as well as across sectors in those regions, consistent with the prediction of valuation theory. Globally, the effect is much stronger among small caps than large caps and is mainly driven by the underperformance of high investment firms. Examining the different components of asset growth related to raising of capital as well as those related to use of capital, we find that all components contribute to the investment effect.

• He, Miao and Kapadia, Nishad and Tice, Sheri: Can the Representativeness Heuristic Explain the Asset Growth Anomaly?

  Abstract: We find that the low average returns to firms with high asset growth are consistent with two key implications of models of diagnostic investor expectations (e.g., Bordalo, Gennaioli, La Porta, and Shleifer, 2019) that formalize the representativeness heuristic of Kahneman and Tversky (1972). These models predict that investors overestimate the subjective probability of states that are more representative of a firm’s type and also neglect risk after a string of good news. We construct a measure of how representative the stereotype the ‘next Google’ is of high asset growth in the recent past. We show that this measure predicts the returns of CMA, the asset growth factor in the five factor model of Fama and French (2015). Returns to CMA are 17.5% over the 3 years after months with high representativeness and only 5.4% following low representativeness months. In the cross-section, we find evidence consistent with investors neglecting the risk of high asset growth firms. The asset growth effect is not present in portfolios with low distress risk and the interaction between distress and asset growth, rather than asset growth by itself, predicts low returns in Fama and MacBeth (1973) regressions and portfolio sorts. We also find that analysts and markets do not appreciate the importance of the interaction between asset growth and distress and are sluggish in responding to news for the ‘interaction’ portfolio. Finally, we show that our measure of representativeness predicts the returns of the interaction portfolio.

• Wang, Kai: Quarterly Asset Growth, the Cross Section of Stock Returns, and Subjective Beliefs

  Abstract: I show that asset growth exhibits substantial quarterly variations within a firm's fiscal year, indicating a potential informational advantage of quarterly asset growth compared to annual asset growth. However, unlike annual asset growth, quarterly asset growth shows no clear relation with subsequent stock returns. This unexpected result arises from the opposing return predictions of individual asset components at the quarterly level, which offset each other when aggregated. Constructing factor portfolios based on quarterly growth of individual asset components uncovers several anomalies not captured by existing models. A monthly-rebalanced factor on quarterly cash growth generates an annualized return of 4.7% (t = 8.2) and a Fama-French five-factor alpha of 4.7% (t = 7.6). For quarterly debt growth, these figures are -5.5% (t = -9.5) and -4.9% (t = -8.7). I argue that investors' belief biases, driven by overreactions to investment rate information, largely explain the return predictability of investment-related asset growth, with empirical evidence supporting this claim.