Choosing the correct portfolio-construction techniques is very important. The new paper that is written by Amar Soebhag, Bart van Vliet, and Patrick Verwijmeren explores the various ways in which different design choices in portfolio construction can, either intentionally or unintentionally, influence and distort the statistical results of a market factor’s research. Their takeaway is that seemingly small differences in design can significantly impact the resultant portfolio’s performance.

The size effect assumes a negative relationship between average stock returns and firm size. In other words, it states that low capitalization stocks outperform stocks with large capitalization. Although generally accepted, the size effect keeps being challenged. Researchers have been asking how important the firm size characteristic actually is, and whether it is possible to replace the traditional size factor of Fama and French asset pricing model (1993) with more accurate factor. Recently, one potential challenger has emerged – so-called takeover factor, employed by Easterwood et al. (2022). In their study, they work on the assumption that small firms are often targets of takeovers, which gives us a different perspective on merger and acquisition news in regards to size effect. Their results show that M&A component of average returns explains the size premium entirely.

Every year, Quantpedia’s team investigates thousands of academic research papers to bring you the most promising ideas from the academic world. We read papers, identify ideas and backtest them to build our unique database. As a result, we have already identified hundreds of factors and built tools to help you orient better in the broad universe of trading strategies and systematic investment factors.

And now, we are opening the possibility to all external researchers, quants, and portfolio managers to contribute to Quantpedia.

A recent spring 2022 crisis in the cryptocurrency market emphasized the importance of market-neutral crypto trading strategies. It’s not enough just to HODL crypto market and hope for the everlasting bull market. Therefore, we continue our series of research articles about the cryptocurrency market and offer an analysis of the skewness anomaly. So after our description of the skewness effect in commodities, an article about the multi-asset skewness strategy, and observation of the skewness/lottery effect in ETFs, we have one more asset class, where we can find lottery/skewness anomaly – in cryptocurrencies.

We focused the first part of this article more on tendencies and trends among these US Equity Value strategies. Today we will talk solely about specific top-performing equity value strategies. More specifically, about numbers #7 to #1 from Quantpedia’s ranking. We will also take a look at combining all the value strategies together into a diversified portfolio of value strategies.