Fundamental Valuation

Can investors time premiums associated with widely used stock/firm fundamental ratios? In their September 2018 paper entitled “It Takes Two to Tango: Fundamental Timing in Stock Market”, Fuwei Jiang, Xinlin Qi, Guohao Tang and Nan Huang use a simple moving average (SMA) trend indicator to time premiums associated with four fundamental stock/firm ratios: book-to-market (BM), earnings-to-price (EP), gross profitability (GP), and return-on-assets (ROA). In calculating these ratios, they lag accounting variables by six months to avoid look-ahead bias. For each ratio, they:

• At the end of each June, rank stocks into tenths (deciles).
• Each day, calculate value-weighted average returns for the deciles with the highest (highest BM, EP, GP, ROA) and lowest (lowest BM, EP, GP, ROA) expected returns and maintain price indexes for these two deciles.
• Each day, hold a long (short) position in the decile with highest (lowest) expected returns only when the decile price index is above (below) its 20-day SMA, indicating an upward (downward) trend. When not holding a decile, hold Treasury bills.

As benchmarks, they each year buy and hold four portfolios that are each long (short) the value-weighted deciles with the highest (lowest) expected returns for one of the fundamental ratios. While focusing on a 20-day SMA, for robustness they also test SMAs of 10, 50, 100 and 200 trading days. While focusing on value weighting, they also look at equal weighting. They run tests on both non-financial Chinese A-share stocks and non-financial U.S. common stocks. Using annual groomed fundamentals data and daily returns for Chinese stocks during January 2001-December 2017 and for U.S. stocks during July 1970-December 2017, and contemporaneous Treasury bill yields, they find that:

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Will equity funds “managed” by artificial intelligence (AI) outperform human investors? To investigate, we consider the performance of AI Powered Equity ETF (AIEQ), which “seeks to provide investment results that exceed broad U.S. Equity benchmark indices at equivalent levels of volatility.” More specifically, offeror EquBot: “…leverages IBM’s Watson AI to conduct an objective, fundamental analysis of U.S.-listed common stocks and real estate investment trusts…based on up to ten years of historical data and apply that analysis to recent economic and news data. Each day, the EquBot Model ranks each company based on the probability of the company benefiting from current economic conditions, trends, and world events and identifies approximately 30 to 70 companies with the greatest potential over the next twelve months for appreciation and their corresponding weights, while maintaining volatility…comparable to the broader U.S. equity market. The Fund may invest in the securities of companies of any market capitalization. The EquBot model recommends a weight for each company based on its potential for appreciation and correlation to the other companies in the Fund’s portfolio. The EquBot model limits the weight of any individual company to 10%.” We use SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) as a simple benchmark for AIEQ performance. Using daily dividend-adjusted closes of AIEQ and SPY from AIEQ inception (October 18, 2017) through October 2018, we find that: Keep Reading

A subscriber, citing the weekly record of S&P 500 earnings growth estimates in the “FactSet Earnings Insight” historical series”, wondered whether estimate trends/revisions are exploitable. To investigate, we collect S&P 500 quarterly year-over-year earnings growth estimates as recorded in this series. These data are bottom-up (firm by firm) aggregates, whether purely from analyst estimates (before any actual earnings releases), or a blend of actual earnings and estimates (during the relevant earnings season). Using these data and contemporaneous weekly levels of the S&P 500 Index during April 2011 through late September 2018, we find that: Keep Reading

A subscriber proposed four alternative ways of timing the U.S. stock market based on simple moving averages (SMA) of the market price-earnings ratio (P/E), as follows:

1. 5-Year Binary – hold stocks (cash) when P/E is below (above) its 5-year SMA.
2. 10-Year Binary – hold stocks (cash) when P/E is below (above) its 10-year SMA.
3. 15-Year Binary – hold stocks (cash) when P/E is below (above) its 15-year SMA.
4. 5-Year Scaled – hold 100% stocks (cash) when P/E is five or more units below (above) its 5-year SMA. Between these levels, scale allocations linearly.

To obtain a sample long enough for testing these rules, we use the monthly U.S. data of Robert Shiller. While offering a very long history, this source has the disadvantage of blurring monthly data as averages of daily values. How well do these alternative timing strategies work for this dataset? Using monthly data for the S&P Composite Index, annual dividends, annual P/E and 10-year government bond yield since January 1871 and monthly 3-month U.S. Treasury bill (T-bill) yield as return on cash since January 1934, all through August 2018, we find that: Keep Reading

The Mojena Market Timing strategy (Mojena), developed and maintained by professor Richard Mojena, is a method for timing the broad U.S. stock market based on a combination of many monetary, fundamental, technical and sentiment indicators to predict changes in intermediate-term and long-term market trends. He adjusts the model annually to incorporate new data. Professor Mojena offers a hypothetical backtest of the timing model since 1970 and a live investing test since 1990 based on the S&P 500 Index (with dividends). To test the robustness of the strategy’s performance, we consider a sample period commencing with inception of SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) as a liquid, low-cost proxy for the S&P 500 Index. As benchmarks, we consider both buying and holding SPY (Buy-and-Hold) and trading SPY with crash protection based on the 10-month simple moving average of the S&P 500 Index (SMA10). Using the trade dates from the Mojena Market Timing live test, daily dividend-adjusted closes for SPY and daily yields for 13-week Treasury bills (T-bills) from the end of January 1993 through August 2018 (over 25 years), we find that: Keep Reading

To determine whether the stock market is expensive or cheap, some experts use aggregate valuation ratios, either trailing or forward-looking, such as earnings-price ratio (E/P) and dividend yield. Operating under a belief that such ratios are mean-reverting, most imminently due to movement of stock prices, these experts expect high (low) future stock market returns when these ratios are high (low). Where are the ratios now? Using the most recent actual and forecasted earnings and dividend data from Standard & Poor’s, we find that: Keep Reading

Are there any gold trading strategies that reliably beat buy-and-hold? In their April 2018 paper entitled “Investing in the Gold Market: Market Timing or Buy-and-Hold?”, Viktoria-Sophie Bartsch, Dirk Baur, Hubert Dichtl and Wolfgang Drobetz test 4,095 seasonal, 18 technical, and 15 fundamental timing strategies for spot gold and gold futures. These strategies switch at the end of each month as signaled between spot gold or gold futures and U.S. Treasury bills (T-bill) as the risk-free asset. They assume trading frictions of 0.2% of value traded. To control for data snooping bias, they apply the superior predictive ability multiple testing framework with step-wise extensions. Using monthly spot gold and gold futures prices and T-bill yield during December 1979 through December 2015, with out-of-sample tests commencing January 1990, they find that:

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A subscriber asked about the lead-lag relationship between S&P 500 earnings and S&P 500 Index returns. To investigate, we relate actual aggregate S&P 500 operating and as-reported earnings to S&P 500 Index returns at both quarterly and annual frequencies. Earnings forecasts are available well in advance of returns. Actual earnings releases for a quarter occur throughout the next quarter. Using quarterly S&P 500 earnings and index levels during March 1988 through March 2018, we find that: Keep Reading

Which factor models of stock returns are currently best? In their June 2018 paper entitled “q⁵“,  Kewei Hou, Haitao Mo, Chen Xue and Lu Zhang, introduce the q⁵ model of stock returns, which adds a fifth factor (expected growth) to the previously developed q-factor model (market, size, asset growth, return on equity). They measure expected growth as 1-year, 2-year and 3-year ahead changes in investment-to-assets (this year total assets minus last year total assets, divided by last year total assets) as forecasted monthly via predictive regressions. They define an expected growth factor as average value-weighted returns for top 30% 1-year expected growth minus bottom 30% 1-year expected growth, calculated separately and further averaged for big and small stocks. They examine expected growth as a standalone factor and then conduct an empirical horse race of recently proposed 4-factor, 5-factor (including q⁵) and 6-factor models of stock returns based on their abilities to explain average return differences for value-weighted extreme tenth (decile) portfolios for 158 significant anomalies. Using monthly return and accounting data for a broad sample of non-financial U.S. common stocks during July 1963–December 2016, they find that:

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Do changes in firm financial reporting practices signal bad news to come? In the February 2018 update of their paper entitled “Lazy Prices”, Lauren Cohen, Christopher Malloy and Quoc Nguyen investigate relationships between changes in firm financial reporting practices (SEC 10-K, 10-K405, 10-KSB and 10-Q filings) and future firm/stock performance. They focus on quarter-to-quarter changes in content bases on four distinct textual similarity metrics. Each month, they rank all firms into fifths (quintiles) for each of the four metrics. They then compute equally weighted or value-weighted returns for these quintiles over future months (such that there are overlapping portfolios for each quintile and each metric), with stock weights within quintile portfolios rebalanced monthly for equal weighting. They measure the effect of changes in financial reporting practices as monthly return for a hedge portfolio that is long (short) the quintile with the smallest (greatest) past changes. Using the specified quarterly and annual SEC filings by U.S. corporations from the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) database and corresponding monthly stock returns during 1995 through 2014, they find that:

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