Phenomenal innovation, new technologies, growth of social media, and e-commerce have been characteristics of the last decades. BigTech companies such as Google, Facebook (Meta), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are becoming so increasingly popular. So now, in connection to the actual carnage on the financial markets, the question arises: are BigTech firms the new “Too Big to Fail”?
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.
Equity Value strategies have suffered hardly during years 2018, 2019 and also 2020. Due to the poor performance of Value during this period, many investors have abandoned the strategy, often expressing view that “Value strategy is not working anymore”. Nevertheless, equity Value strategies have managed a strong comeback recently, turning attention of investors and traders back to them. In our blog today, we will take a close look at many different equity Value strategies, their performance and how they behave.
Quantpedia has already covered a countless number of factor investing strategies and articles, from strategies in our Screener to multiple blog posts. Therefore, we can confidently say that we do like factor investing. However, there is always new research with a unique point of view. For example, we recently found a paper focused on the decay of the factor exposures of equity factor strategies. The study examines five factors: Value, Momentum, Quality, Investment, and Low Volatility, across 12 developed and emerging markets over a 20-year period. This research aims to find out how long it takes for a factor to decay after the portfolio is assembled. In other words, how often should the portfolio be rebalanced?
How often do you think about the weights of the assets in your portfolio? Do you weigh your assets equally, or do you prefer value-weighting? The researchers behind a recent research paper analyzed various weighting schemes and examined their effect on factor strategy return. They studied five weighting schemes that ignore prices: equal weighting, rank weighting, z-score weighting, inverse volatility weighting, and fundamental weighting, and three price-based weighting schemes: Rank x mcap (rank-times-mcap), Z-score x mcap (z-score-times-mcap), and Integrated core.
They found that schemes that are not based on price can inflate turnover and costs. However, the weighting schemes based on price are the most practical to target multiple premiums, provide robust risk control, and decrease turnover and expenses.
This second article offers a different look at high inflation periods, which we already analyzed in What’s the Best Factor for High Inflation Periods? – Part I. The second part looks at factor performance during two 10-year periods of high inflation. What’s our main takeaway? The best hedge for a high inflation period is the value or momentum factor. Other promising factors (energy sector, small-cap stocks, or long-run reversal) don’t perform as consistently as value and momentum.
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