Tag Archives: Indexology

value investing today

October 27, 2015 By in Absolute vs. relative performance, book value, growth vs value, mean reversion, Strategy, two flavors of value Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

S&P’s Indexology blog posted an article yesterday on value investing in the US, titled “Losing My Religion.”

The gist of the post is that both over the past one- and ten-year periods, value investing strategies have generally, and pretty steadily, underperformed the S&P.  The author, Tim Edwards, senior director of index investment strategy for S&P, suggests that this may be because value investing has become too popular.  In his words, “With so much energy directed to exploiting the excess returns available through value investing, maybe the only “value” stocks left are the value traps, those stocks whose prices are low as their prospects are determinedly poor.”

my semi-random thoughts

  1.  Value investing has been around at least since the 1930s and is the dominant investment style for professionals worldwide.  Growth stock investing may be a close second to value in the US but is a non-starter elsewhere.
  2. Value investing does not mean buying stocks that are cheap relative to their future prospects, i.e., bargains.  Rather, it’s a rule-governed process of buying–depending on the flavor of value an adherent espouses, the rule can involve the stocks with the lowest price to earnings, price to cash flow or price to net assets ratio–on the idea that the market has already factored into prices the worst that can possible happen, and then some.  If so, once the market begins to turn an objective eye toward such stocks once more, their prices will rise.  At the same time, downside is limited because the stocks can’t fall off the floor.
  3. As a dyed-in-the-wool growth stock investor (who has worked side by side with value colleagues for virtually all of his professional career),  my observation is that value stock indices routinely include growth stocks.  Growth indices, in contrast, are often salted with stocks that are well past their best-by date and that are ticking time bombs no self-respecting growth stock investor would own.  Academics use these mischaracterized indices to “prove” the superiority of value over growth.  Indexers use similar methodologies.  Be that as it may, this is another reason for surprise at the years-long underperformance of value.
  4. Early in my career I became acquainted with a married couple, where the husband was an excellent growth stock investor, the wife a similarly accomplished value stock picker.  She outperformed him in the first two years of a business cycle; he outperformed her in the next two years.  Their long-term records were identical.  This is how value and growth worked until the late 1990s.

The late 1990s produced a super-long growth cycle that culminated in the Internet bust of 2000.  That was followed by a super value cycle that ran most of the next 4-5 years.  Both were a break with past patterns.  The strength of the second may be a reason value has looked so bad since.

5.  Still, what I find surprising about the past decade is the persistent underperformance of value, despite the birth of a post-Great Recession business cycle in 2009.  The cycle turn has always been the prime period of value outperformance.  Why not now?     …the Internet.

More tomorrow.

Hope over experience?—S&P Indexology

May 26, 2015 By in Academic Theories, index funds, Investment firms, securities markets, stock market Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

I subscribe to the S&P Indexology blog.  It’s written by S&P staff involved in manufacturing the company’s well-known financial markets indices.  Usually it’s interesting, although the writers’ true-believer conviction that no active manager is capable of matching–to say nothing of outperforming–his benchmark index often shines through.

Yesterday’s post, titled “Hope over Experience, ” is a case in point.  It takes on a recent, pretty silly Wall Street Journal article that muses about an “Old-School Comeback”  of active stock mutual fund management, based on recent outperformance of the average active manager over the S&P 500.  “Recent” in this case means the first four months of 2015; “outperformance” means a gain of .33% versus the S&P.

The obvious observations are that the time period cited is extremely short and that the gain versus the index is probably statistically insignificant.  S&P Indexology goes on to say that the comparison itself is bogus. The S&P 500 is neither the appropriate or the actual official benchmark for many stock mutual funds, which have, say, growth, value, small-cap or other mandates and other benchmarks than the S&P 500.

So far, so good.

Then come two comments straight out of the university professor’s playbook:

–The first is the argument that because an active manager’s portfolio structure may be dissected, after the fact, into allocations that could have been replicated by indices, actually creating and implementing that structure in advance has no value.  That I don’t get at all.

–Indexology concludes by suggesting that because investing in the aggregate is a zero-sum game–the total winner’s pluses and losers’ minuses exactly offset one another, before costs–there can’t be any individual investors who consistently outperform.

I believe that life in general, and investing in particular, is a lot like baseball.  (I’ve been thinking about baseball recently because it’s in season).  The second Indexology comment is much like saying that the Giants’ winning three World Series in five years is a random occurrence.   …or that the change in ownership of the Cubs and the hiring of Theo Epstein have nothing to do with the club’s success this year.  Yes, bad teams get a preference in the draft each year, but the end to a century of futility?

…and what about the Braves and Cardinals, who consistently field above-average teams even though their draft positioning does them no favors.

To be clear, I’m an advocate of index funds.  My reasoning for this is not that outperformance is impossible (the ivory tower orthodoxy) but that it takes more time and effort than most people like you and me are willing to put in to locate and monitor active managers.  I’d be much more comfortable with Indexology saying this.