Active Share is a popular metric used to gauge how actively managed a portfolio is compared to its benchmark, but its predictive power for fund performance is questionable. Our research suggests that high Active Share often reflects exposure to systematic equity factors rather than genuine stock-picking skill. Additionally, inaccuracies in benchmark selection can distort the metric’s insights, making it unreliable as a standalone measure. A more effective approach is to conduct a factor analysis of alpha to better understand a manager’s performance and true sources of over/underperformance.

Today, we will venture a little into the fundamental analysis corner, and we will give you a glimpse of an intriguing paper (Hillenbrand and McCarthy, 2024) that discusses the advantages of using ‘Street’ earnings over traditional GAAP earnings. The paper suggests that ‘Street’ earnings provide better valuation estimates and improved financial analysis. Is this a way how to improve the performance of the struggling equity value factor?

Equal-weighted benchmark portfolios are sometimes overshadowed by the more popular market capitalization benchmarks but are still popular and often used in practice. One of the advantages of equal-weighted portfolios is that academic research shows that in the long term, they tend to outperform their market-cap-weighted peers, mainly due to positive loadings on well-known factor premiums like size and value. So, if equal weighting outperforms market-cap weighting (in the long term), what options do we have if we want to outperform equal weighting? A recent paper by Cirulli and Walker comes to our aid with an interesting proposal …

We mentioned multiple times that we at Quantpedia love historical analysis that spans over a long period of time as it offers a unique glimpse into the different macro environments and periods of political and economic instabilities. These long-term studies help a lot in risk management, and they also help investors set the right expectations about the range of outcomes in the future. Historical analysis of equity and fixed-income markets is not rare, but currency markets are less explored. Therefore, we are happy to investigate a recent paper by Joseph Chen that analyzes carry, momentum, and value strategies in the currency markets over the 200-year history.

Two weeks ago, we promised you a surprise, and now it’s finally time to unveil what we have prepared for you :).

Our Quantpedia Awards 2024 aims to be the premier competition for all quantitative trading researchers. If you have an idea in your head about systematic/quantitative trading or investment strategy, and you would like to gain visibility on the professional scene, then submit your research paper, and you can compete for an attractive list of prizes. All info about the prizes, submission process, expert committee, and our partners are described in detail on our dedicated subpage: Quantpedia Awards 2024. But we will also give you a quick overview in this blog post.

In a game of poker, it is usually said that when you do not know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy. The world of finance is not different. It is good to know who your counterparties are and which investors/traders drive the return of anomalies you focus on. We discussed that a few months ago in a short blog article called “Which Investors Drive Factor Returns?“. Different sets of investors and their approaches drive different anomalies, and we have one more paper that helps uncover the motivation of investors and traders for trading and their impact on anomaly returns.