How Well Do Factor Investing Funds Replicate Academic Factors?
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.