Over the course of the last decades, the analysis of structural reasons for equity out- or underperformance has been a widely discusses academic topic. New explanatory factors, such as accruals (Sloan, 1996), were established and former explanatory factors lost some of their predictive power, as Fama and French (2003) show in the case of beta. One of the more recent explanatory factors is the F-Score (Piotroski, 2000), which has strong practical utility in separating winners from losers in the value segment of the market. In his paper, our friend Jan Mohr provides evidence on the utility of F-Score in the growth segment of the market. This study was done in collaboration with MFIE. Separating growth stocks by applying F-Score seems to be a promising strategy. In constructing a market-neutral portfolio, buying high F-Score and shorting low F-Score growth stocks seems to yield a positive return.  To get the full version of this interesting paper, click on the link below :  Utility of Piotroski F-Score for predicting Growth-Stock Returns (33.38 kb)   Philip Vanstraceele

Why isn’t everybody doing it? This post is all about how to survive a bar conversation as a banker these days.I happen to be a banker and my friends happen to know that I am a banker. As the global media has lately been “occupied” by demonstrations of how bankers know sure ways to make money, I have been entangled in bar conversations around the stock market and techniques how to make money in the stock market. So please let me share with you some content from a typical bar conversation I had as of recently. (Disclaimer: if you expect this post to become a little bit more quantitative and useful, keep on reading- if you actually think this post deals with how to survive a bar conversation as a banker, you might be well-advised to keep on reading here ) So my typical friend would ask me, with a gentle sub-tone of sarcasm: “as you are a banker and you work with the stock market, you can now tell me how to make money.”When I respond “yes, indeed”, my friend would normally not believe me and would ask for evidence. Luckily, it’s easy to show evidence in a blog (I have a harder time in a bar), so look here  , here  , here  , here  or here We basically talk about a phenomenon of structural return patters that can be explained by certain factors. In practice these factors come down to buying cheap instead of expensive stocks (value factor), buying stocks on the rise (momentum factor), avoiding stocks that have recently issued new shares (equity offerings factor) and several others. Let me tackle the most prominent of the factors which is the value factor. You have definitely heart about “value mangers”, i.e. fund managers who are on the constant hunt for cheap stocks. Taking a look at value managers oftentimes reveals very attractive long-term track records as these guys capture a large chunk of the structural return outperformance of the value effect. In fact, buying cheap stocks and avoiding expensive ones will make you money, just take a look here . Now my friend would ask me: “why in the world isn’t everybody doing it?” If you are keen to make money but have no interest at all in my elaborate explanation of “why”, then feel free to scroll down to the “how” section in the very last paragraph of this article. The scientists Fama and French got a great deal of attention for empirically testing the value effect (among other effects) and showing that it in fact yields an outperformance. These guys are both disciples of a breed that believes in markets being efficient everywhere and anytime. In their world, excess return can only be achieved by taking excess risk. As value stocks show excess returns they are more risky. QED, right?Well, both gentlemen define risk as variance of returns (vulgo: the more your return jumps around the more risky it is). Unfortunately for Fama / French, the returns of value stocks actually do not jump around as much as they would if the authors’ assumptions were right. Check Capaul, Rowley and Sharpe (1993) for further reference.My very bar friend might now argue that risk could be something else but variance of returns. I couldn’t agree more, so let’s take a look at what Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny tested in 1994. They were not satisfied by Fama and French’s risk concept and hence derived a different idea of risk. They say that if value stocks were more risky than growth stocks (i.e. expensive stocks), we could observe periods in which value stocks underperform growth stocks. Moreover, they regard underperformance of an asset class in times of economic trouble as a good indicator for the embedded risk. In fact, during recessions, investors tend to be more risk averse and get rid of risky assets. So if they get rid of value stocks during recessions- we prove that all outperformance of value stocks is just compensation for taking the recession risk! However, during the 1968 to 1989 timeframe, the authors could not show any relation between value stock underperformance and the occurrence of recessions. Indeed, they found only few instances where value stocks underperformed at all. As my bar friend is not stupid, he argues: “if it is not risk that causes value stocks to perform so well- couldn’t I generate a risk-adjusted outperformance easily?”“Kinda”, according to Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny. The argument of the authors is that value effect is strongly related to several behavioral heuristics many investors apply. For example, human beings tend to have a hard time thinking in mean-reversion concepts. An ongoing trend is often extrapolated rather than assumed to revert to a general mean. The authors actually find very cool evidence regarding expected growth rates for stocks. For example, there is evidence that the companies with the lowest expected future growth actually show higher growth ex-ante than companies with the highest expected future growth. So much for analyst expectations!Moreover, the authors argue that positions in growth stocks are easier to maintain for institutional investors as they have a history of strong fundamental performance. After all: who wants to present an ugly duckling to the investment committee? Go Groupon! Go Green Mountain Coffee Roasters! (The latter trading for a mere 4.5x sales- after dropping 65% over the last three months) “Good”, my friend argues, “I am neither an institutional investor nor do I have to extrapolate every trend into the future- can I now safely make money by buying value stocks?” “Wait”, argues Jeremy Grantham of investment firm GMO. In his April 2010 speech at the Graham and Dodd Breakfast he tears apart the value effect and presents to us a very convincing case why value effect is related to a special risk when you look closely enough. Read the piece here , I am not exaggerating when I say it is one of the five best articles I have ever read on value investing. Grantham takes a look at proprietary data and tests the endurance of value effect when the economy goes down a lot. Think Great Depression (post-1929) and Great Recession (post-2007). During these times, value stocks performed much, much worse than growth stocks. Please read his paper, the data is mind-boggling. In other words, the outperformance of value stocks is a compensation for the near-wipeout investors suffer in a value portfolio when very hard times hit. For all of you who are familiar with the risk-management concept of value-at-risk: think about the outperformance phases for value stocks as the 99%-area of the return distribution. Only in 1% of the time, disaster hits and your value portfolio gets impaired. Hence, the excess return of value stocks is somewhat of the discounted expected shortfall value stocks suffer during times of crisis. Adding to his point, Grantham also mentions how well high-quality stocks perform over time. Contrary to what you would expect, stocks with healthy balance sheets, high returns on capital and low earnings swings actually outperform the market. Quality is important, especially in times of deep economic trouble but value stocks rarely possess quality attributes. My friend: “therefore my goal should be to a) buy value stocks to capture the institutional mispricing and b) avoid the large declines during deep recessions. How can I do that?”I then go on to explain concepts that combine value and quality like the Magic Formula of Joel Greenblatt or F-Score by Joseph Piotroski. Both add to the list of value stocks an additional layer that kicks out fundamentally distressed companies. What you end up with is a mixture of cheap and good. “Does this make sense to you?” I ask my friend. While my friend nods and orders another round of beer, check out the empirical results from such a cheap/good strategy here  Jan Mohr    

  One of the remains of the Graham-Newman era (except Warren Buffet himself ) is Tweedy, Browne Company LLC. Founded in 1920, Buffets favorites’ stockbroker, was located at 52 Wall Street, in the same building as Ben Graham had once worked. Even Walter Schloss was sub-renting some space in their tiny office and running his partnership from behind a battered desk in a small room. They diversified to arbitrage, workouts, etc., all in tradition of the Graham-Newman days, before becoming an investment company and a professional money manager. It was Tom Knapp who joined Tweedy, Brown in 1958 that brought the Graham philosophy along. The companies credo was and still is basic value investing in the Graham-Newman tradition. It manages over 13billion $ in separate accounts for both private customers and institutions as in different managed funds, all Value based.  Since 1993 their Global Value Fund has outperformed their benchmark (MSCI) and resulted in an annual return before taxes of 10.05% (07/31/2011). Christopher Brown was also the author of “The little book of value-investing” and the paper “What has worked in investing” Both must-reads for the Value oriented investor. Their methods are simple and straightforward and are still used as of today; Under valuated stocks have empirically been proven, low risk, and produced attractive long-term rates of return. Before purchase a stock must have one or more of the following characteristics; Low price in relation to asset value ,although Grahams net nets are hard to find (66% of net current asset value)  Low price to book value (preferably with a low <20% Debt to Equity) Low price in relation to earnings (keep in mind that value and growth should go together!) Low price to cash flow. Stocks with low price to dividend yield. A significant pattern of purchases by one or more insiders (managers and directors) A significant decline in a Stock’s price (reversion to the mean is almost a law of nature) Small market capitalization (because of their higher rate of growth and are more easily acquired by other corporations) In fact, there methods and analysis were funded by different value studies made over the years respectively by; Professors Lakonishok,Vishny and Shleifer (Paper: Contrairian Investment,Extrapolation and Risk). http://research.chicagobooth.edu/economy/research/articles/84.pdf Professors Chan, Lakonishok ( “Value and Growth” ; Financial Analysts journal Feb.2004). http://www.lsvasset.com/pdf/Value-Review.pdf Professor Mario Levis (“Stock Market Anomalies” ; Dividend Yield study) They all are still used in conjunction with each other. In fact the basic idea is simply not paying too much for an investment and in that way create a margin of safety, and thus arrive straight back to Ben Graham.   Luc Allaeys