Equal Weighting, Firm Age and Stock Returns

Does stock performance vary with age (since listing), and does any such effect interact with market capitalization (size)? In their April 2019 paper entitled “Age Matters”, Danqiao Guo, Phelim Boyle, Chengguo Weng and Tony Wirjanto examine age and size of U.S. stocks in combination. To disentangle interaction, they generate 20,000 simulations for each of two sets of portfolios separately for holdings of 5, 25, 50 or 100 stocks:

1. Rebalanced – a randomly selected equal-weighted portfolio rebalanced each month to equal weight after replacing delisted stocks (roughly 10% of stocks each year) with replacements randomly selected from those in the full sample not already in the portfolio. New stocks are representative of the market in terms of age, while residual stocks age by a month, such that the portfolio tends to grow older.
2. Bootstrapped – a randomly selected equal-weighted (also, for reference, value-weighted) portfolio that is each month liquidated and randomly reformed, such that it remains representative of the full sample in terms of age.

If stock return is related to age, these two sets of portfolios perform differently. They further compare performances of 16 portfolios double-sorted into four age groups (quartiles) and four size quartiles. Using monthly returns and listing dates for a broad sample of U.S. stocks during July 1926 through December 2016, they find that: (more…)