India is a big emerging market, actually the second biggest after China. We primarily look at developed markets, mostly the U.S. and Europe, and from Emerging Markets, China at most, and we are aware that we neglect this prospective country. We would like to correct this notion and give attention to a country that is (along with China) being cited as a new potential rising superpower and already looking to take the lead of Emerging Markets (EM) countries. Today, we would like to review the paper that analyzes the performance of main equity factors (with an emphasis on the Quality factor) and is a good starting point to understand the specifics of factor investing strategies in India.

Low volatility investing is an appealing approach to compound wealth in the stock market for the long term. This particular factor investing style exploits the popular naive notion that lower (higher) risk must always equal lower (higher) overall returns. But in fact, this naive assumption is not true, as low-volatility investments often yield more than their high-volatility counterparts. While low-volatility investing has many advantages, it also results in some disadvantages. How to overcome them? Bernhard Breloer, Martin Kolrep, Thorsten Paarmann, and Viorel Roscovan, in their study Dissecting the Performance of Low Volatility Investing, propose a solution.

The latest paper by Sak, H. and Chang, M. T., and Huang, T. delves into the world of financial anomalies, exploring the rise and fall of characteristics in what researchers refer to as the “factor zoo.” While significant research effort is devoted to discovering new anomalies, the study highlights the lack of attention given to the evolution of these characteristics over time. By leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques, the paper conducts a comprehensive out-of-sample factor zoo analysis, seeking to uncover the underlying factors driving stock returns. The researchers train ML models on a vast database of firm and trading characteristics, generating a diverse range of linear and non-linear factor structures. The ML portfolio formed based on these findings outperforms entrenched factor models, presenting a novel approach to understanding financial anomalies. Notably, the paper identifies two subsets of dominant characteristics – one related to investor-level arbitrage constraint and the other to firm-level financial constraint – which alternately play a significant role in generating the ML portfolio return.

Cremers, Liu, B. Riley (Apr 2023) share their view on and try to answer the question: how well do factor investing funds perform? They conclude that, on average, factor-investing funds do not outperform. But using active characteristic share (ACS)—an adaption of Cremers and Petajisto’s (2009) original active share measure—, the authors demonstrate that the factor investing funds that match indexes the most have significantly better performance. An equal-weighted portfolio of factor investing funds in the lowest tercile of ACS outperforms an equal-weighted portfolio of funds in the highest tercile by 3.82% per year (t-stat = 3.89) using the CAPM and by 1.08% per year (t-stat = 2.01) using the CPZ6 model.

Sector/industry picking or country picking can be a profitable trading style but is usually much more challenging than it seems at first sight. Building a good trading model requires a lot of research and dedication. Unfortunately, due to the limited numbers of industries and countries, sorting them on aggregate characteristics can wash out important cross-sectional variations in the characteristics and lead to concentrated portfolios prone to noisier realized returns.

In their fresh Dimensional Fund Advisors research piece, Dong, Huang, and Medhat (2023) touch on the question of whether investors should systematically emphasize certain industries or countries to increase expected returns. Their overhead view provides new insights and sums that investors will likely be better off pursuing premiums in the larger cross-section of individual securities and maintaining broad diversification across the smaller cross-sections of industries and countries.

If different investors share a common goal, why are there differences in strategy choices and portfolio characteristics across investor classes? Elsaify (2022) attempts to provide an answer. In his study, he documents heterogeneity in investors’ processing abilities, which is the key factor influencing investor’s strategy choice and finds that such heterogeneity stems from factor timing ability.

According to the results, hedge funds seem to have the highest attention capacity, the most precise information and excel at factor timing. On the other hand, long-term investors (insurance companies and pension funds), brokers, and short-sellers exhibit low attention capacity because of their timing inability. They spend relatively more attention on the fundamental, their portfolios have the least dispersion and variance and their impact on factor returns is limited.