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.

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.

Bearish trends or deep corrections in international equity markets starting in 2022 and rising interest rates worldwide brought investors’ attention back to not only once-proclaimed dead factor investing. From long-run and short run, during different market cycles, different factors behave differently. What’s fortunate is that it is pretty predictable to some extent. Andrew Ang, Head of Factor Investing Strategies at BlackRock, in his Trends and Cycles of Style Factors in the 20th and 21st Centuries (2022), used Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter and spectral analysis to investigate different models to draw some general conclusions on most-widely used factors. We will take a look at a few of quite the most interesting ones of them.

At the moment, there is a lot of attention surrounding overnight anomalies in various types of financial markets. While such effects have been well documented in research, especially in US equities and derivatives, there are other asset classes that are not as well addressed. A recent (2022) paper from Jiang, Luo, and Ye contributed appealing evidence in favor of validating these phenomena in the Chinese market. We highlight the finding that the market MKT factor beta premium is earned exclusively overnight and tend to reverse intraday (and in smaller potency also value HML and profitability RMW), which is the same finding as for the US equities. In contrast, the size SMB factor exhibit significantly opposite pattern: positive intraday premium and negative overnight premium (and the same for investment CMA factor).

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.

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.