Emptying the Equity Factor Zoo?

As described in “Quantifying Snooping Bias in Published Anomalies”, anomalies published in leading journals offer substantial opportunities for exploitation on a gross basis. What profits are left after accounting for portfolio maintenance costs? In their November 2017 paper entitled “Accounting for the Anomaly Zoo: A Trading Cost Perspective”, Andrew Chen and Mihail Velikov examine the combined effects of post-publication return deterioration and portfolio reformation frictions on 135 cross-sectional stock return anomalies published in leading journals. Their proxy for trading frictions is modeled stock-level effective bid-ask spread based on daily returns, representing a lower bound on costs for investors using market orders. Their baseline tests employ hedge portfolios that are long (short) the equally weighted fifth, or quintile, of stocks with the highest (lowest) expected returns for each anomaly. They also consider capitalization weighting, sorts into tenths (deciles) rather than quintiles and portfolio constructions that apply cost-suppression techniques. Using data as specified in published articles for replication of 135 anomaly hedge portfolios, they find that:

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