A Better Stock Value Ratio?

Is there a better stock value ratio than commonly used ones such as book-to-market, dividend-to-price, earnings-to-price and cash flow-to-price ratios? In the January 2020 revision of his paper entitled “A New Value Strategy”, Baolian Wang investigates the effectiveness of cash-based operating profitability-to-price (COP/P) as a value ratio. He computes COP as operating profitability minus accruals, with operating profitability defined as revenue minus cost of goods sold and reported selling, general and administrative expenses (not including expenditures on research and development). He each year at the end of June sorts stocks into tenths, or deciles, based on COP/P and then calculates next-month excess returns for a value-weighted or equal-weighted hedge portfolio that is long (short) the decile with the highest (lowest) values of COP/P. Using monthly returns and annual, 6-month lagged and groomed accounting data for non-financial U.S. common stocks during 1963 through 2018 period, he finds that: (more…)