Equity Premium

Should investors consider adding Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) Initial Public Offerings (IPO), which boomed in 2020, to their portfolios? In the March 2021 revision of their paper entitled “SPACs”, Minmo Gahng, Jay Ritter and Donghang Zhang examine investor returns on SPACs during the two phases of their lifecycle:

1. SPAC phase– from SPAC IPO to five trading days before completion of target business merger or, if no merger within 24 months, liquidation. To measure investor returns for this phase, they assume purchases of one SPAC unit (usually a common share and warrants) at IPO prices for 114 SPACs during January 2010 through May 2018. The investor sells each component at the higher of the market price or the redemption price.
2. deSPAC phase – from the first trading day as a merged company. For this phase, there are 114 completed mergers (105 having warrants), including 97 from the above SPAC phase plus 17 additional SPACs.

Using price data for U.S. SPACs (not those traded in Over-The-Counter markets) during January 2010 through October 2020, they find that:

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How much does accounting for equity factor portfolio maintenance frictions affect usefulness of factor models of stock returns. In their March 2021 paper entitled “Model Selection with Transaction Costs”, Andrew Detzel, Robert Novy-Marx and Mihail Velikov examine effects of transaction costs on six leading models of stock returns:

1. FF5 – Fama-French 5-factor model (market, size, book-to-market , investment and accruals-based profitability, reformed annually).
2. FF6 – FF5 plus a momentum factor.
3. HXZ4 – Hou, Xue, and Zhang 4-factor model (market, size, investment and profitability, all reformed monthly).
4. BS6 – Barillas-Shanken 6-factor model (market, size, book-to-market reformed monthly, investment, return on equity and momentum).
5. FF5_C – FF5 with a cash flow-based profitability factor.
6. FF6_C – FF6 with a cash flow-based profitability factor.

They compare model effectiveness based on maximum squared Sharpe ratio (SR²), which measures how closely a model approaches the in-sample efficient frontier for all test assets. They measure transaction costs using stock-level effective bid-ask spread. Using data to calculate all factors employed by the six models and effective spreads during January 1972 through December 2017, they find that: Keep Reading

Several recent papers find that most studies identifying factors that predict stock returns are not replicable or derive from snooping of many factors. Is there a good counter-argument? In their January 2021 paper entitled “Is There a Replication Crisis in Finance?”, Theis Ingerslev Jensen, Bryan Kelly and Lasse Pedersen apply a Bayesian model of factor replication to a set of 153 factors applied to stocks across 93 countries. For each factor in each country, they each month:

1. Sort stocks into thirds (top/middle/bottom) with breakpoints based on non-micro stocks in that country.
2. For each third, compute a “capped value weight” gross return (winsorizing market equity at the NYSE 80th percentile to ensure that tiny stocks have tiny weights no mega-stock dominates).
3. Calculate the gross return for a hedge portfolio that is long (short) the third with the highest (lowest) expected return.
4. Calculate the corresponding 1-factor gross alpha via simple regression versus the country portfolio.

They further propose a taxonomy that systematically assigns each of the 153 factors to one of 13 themes based on high within-theme return correlations and conceptual similarities. Using firm and stock data required to calculate the specified factors starting 1926 for U.S. stocks and 1986 for most developed countries (in U.S. dollars), and 1-month U.S. Treasury bill yields to compute excess returns, all through 2019, they find that: Keep Reading

Is following the lead of certain types of equity investors as effective as using widely accepted factor models of stock returns? In their March 2021 paper entitled “What Do the Portfolios of Individual Investors Reveal About the Cross-Section of Equity Returns?”, Sebastien Betermier, Laurent Calvet, Samuli Knüpfer and Jens Kvaerner construct a factor model of stocks returns based on demographics of the individual investors who own them. They construct investor factors by each year reforming portfolios that are long (short) the 30% of stocks with the highest (lowest) expected returns based on holdings-weighted investor demographics and then measuring returns of these hedge portfolios the following year. They compare these investor factors to conventional factors constructed from firm/stock characteristics. Using anonymized demographics and direct stock holdings of Norwegian investors (an average 365,000 per year), and associated firm/stock characteristics and returns (over 400 stocks listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange), during 1997 through 2018, they find that:

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How has the market environment changed with the introduction of zero-commission trading and associated interest in trading among many inexperienced users? In their January 2021 paper entitled “Zero-Commission Individual Investors, High Frequency Traders, and Stock Market Quality”, Gregory Eaton, Clifton Green, Brian Roseman and Yanbin Wu examine market implications of growth in trading by a new subclass of retail investors represented by Robinhood users, focusing on January 2020 through August 2020 when the number of Robinhood users becomes very large. They isolate Robinhood user impacts by comparing market behaviors during Robinhood outages (real-time complaints by at least 200 Robinhood users on DownDetector.com) to those during similar times of day the prior week. They rely on the Reddit WallStreetBets forum and lagged trading activity to identify which stocks Robinhood users would have traded during outages. Using hourly (normal market hours) breadth of stock ownership data for Robinhood users from Robintrack (stocks with minimum average ownership 500 and daily minimum owners 50) and associated stock trading data during July 2018 through August 2020 (when the RobinTrack dataset ends), they find that:

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How can the retail trader tail wag the market dog? In their February 2021 paper entitled “The Equity Market Implications of the Retail Investment Boom”, Philippe van der Beck and Coralie Jaunin quantify impacts of the Robinhood-catalyzed retail trading boom on the U.S. stock market. They focus on the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which retail trading soars and institutional investors rebalance their portfolios. They approximate retail trading based on account holdings data from RobinTrack and institutional rebalancing based on SEC Form 13F filings. Using RobinTrack account U.S. common stock holdings data as available through the first half of 2020 (discontinued August 2020) and institutional common stock holdings as disclosed in 13F filings during January 2005 through June 2020, they find that: Keep Reading

Why have so many quantitative funds performed poorly in recent years? In his January 2021 paper entitled “The Quant Crisis of 2018-2020: Cornered by Big Growth”, David Blitz examines in detail recent (June 2018 through August 2020) performance of stock portfolios constructed from five widely accepted long-short factors:

1. Size – Small Minus Big (SMB) market capitalizations.
2. Value – High Minus Low (HML) book-to-market ratios.
3. Investment – Conservative Minus Aggressive (CMA).
4. Profitability – Robust Minus Weak (RMW).
5. Momentum – Winners Minus Losers (WML).

Using factor returns from the Kenneth French data library and additional firm/stock data for developed and U.S. markets to construct alternative factor performance tests from various start dates through August 2020, he finds that: Keep Reading

What performance should investors expect from the S&P 500 Index based on price-to-earnings (P/E) and Cyclically-Adjusted Price-to-Earnings (CAPE, or P/E10)? In their November 2020 paper entitled “Extreme Valuations and Future Returns of the S&P 500”, Shaun Rowles and Andrew Mitchell take a layered “regression upon a regression” approach to predict S&P 500 Index returns and level. First, to estimate future returns, they run a linear regression on P/E, P/E10, S&P 500 dividend yield, inflation, 10-year U.S. Treasury note yield, historical 1-year, 3-year, 5-year and 10-year S&P 500 Index returns and percentiles of many of these variables within their respective historical distributions. Then, they run separate linear regressions to predict 1-year, 3-year, 5-year and 10-year future annualized returns. Finally, they run a linear regression to model current S&P 500 Index level for comparison to actual current level. Using Robert Shiller’s U.S. stock market and economic data spanning January 1871 through June 2020, they find that: Keep Reading

A subscriber requested evaluation of three retirement investment alternatives, assuming a constant increment invested at the end of each month, as follows:

1. 50-50: allocate each increment via fixed percentages to stocks and bonds (for comparability, we use 50% to each).
2. Seasonal 1: during April through September (October through March), allocate 100% of each increment to stocks (bonds).
3. Seasonal 2: during April through September (October through March), allocate 100% of each increment to bonds (stocks).

The hypothesis is that seasonal variation in asset class allocations could improve overall long-term investment performance. We conduct a short-term test using SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) as a proxy for stocks and iShares iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF (LQD) as a proxy for bonds. We then conduct a long-term test using Vanguard 500 Index Fund Investor Shares (VFINX) as a proxy for stocks and Vanguard Long-Term Investment-Grade Fund Investor Shares (VWESX) as a proxy for bonds. Based on the setup, we focus on terminal value as the essential performance metric. Using total (dividend-adjusted) returns for SPY and LQD since July 2002 and for VFINX and VWESX since January 1980, all through December 2020, we find that: Keep Reading

“Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy” (SACEVS) finds that investors may be able to exploit relative valuation of the term risk premium, the credit (default) risk premium and the equity risk premium via exchange-traded funds (ETF). However, the backtesting period is limited by available histories for ETFs and for series used to estimate risk premiums. To construct a longer test, we make the following substitutions for potential holdings (selected for length of available samples):

• Monthly average 3-Month Treasury Bill (T-bill) Secondary Market Rate instead of monthly average 3-Month T-bill Constant Maturity Rate as the risk-free rate and return on Cash.
• Vanguard GNMA Investor Shares (VFIIX) instead of  iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT).
• Vanguard Long-Term Investment Grade Investor Shares (VWESX) instead of iShares iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond (LQD).
• Vanguard 500 Index Fund Investor Shares (VFINX) instead of SPDR S&P 500 (SPY).

To enable estimation of risk premiums over a longer history, we also substitute:

• Monthly average Moody’s Seasoned Baa Corporate Bond Yields rather than day before end-of-month Baa yields for calculation of the credit risk premium. This substitution ignores a one-day delay in release of daily data.
• Robert Shiller’s S&P Composite Index monthly average levels instead of S&P 500 Index monthly closes. This substitution ignores any delay in posting of Shiller data (but new data are available elsewhere in real time).
• Robert Shiller’s monthly S&P Composite Index (GAAP, or as-reported) earnings instead of S&P Dow Jones S&P 500 operating earnings. We lag the Shiller earnings by four months to ensure real-time availability. In other words, the earnings yield for a month is the S&P Composite Index level for that month divided by index annual GAAP earnings as of four months ago. GAAP earnings are generally lower than operating earnings (see “Stock Market Valuation Ratio Trends”).
• Robert Shiller’s monthly average Long Interest Rates instead of monthly average yields on 10-year Constant Maturity U.S. Treasury notes. This substitution ignores any delay in posting of Shiller data (but new data are again available elsewhere with little delay).

As with ETFs, we consider two alternatives for exploiting premium undervaluation: Best Value, which picks the most undervalued premium; and, Weighted, which weights all undervalued premiums according to degree of undervaluation. Based on the assets considered, the principal benchmark is a monthly rebalanced portfolio of 60% VFINX and 40% VFIIX. Using monthly risk premium calculation data during March 1934 through November 2020 (limited by availability of T-bill data), and monthly dividend-adjusted closing prices for the three asset class mutual funds during June 1980 through November 2020 (40+ years, limited by VFIIX), we find that:

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