Betting Against Beta, Plus Market Momentum

A betting against beta (BAB) portfolio is long low-beta assets and short high-beta assets, with each side leveraged to a beta of one. Do strong past stock market returns (when investors tend to overweight high-beta stocks) predict an increase in BAB returns? In his June 2018 paper entitled “Time-Varying Leverage Demand and Predictability of Betting-Against-Beta”, Esben Hedegaard tests the prediction that BAB performs better in times and in countries after high past stock market returns in three ways: (1) regression of BAB returns versus past market returns; (2) sorts of BAB returns into fifths (quintiles) based on past market returns; and, (3) a timing strategy that is long BAB half the time and short BAB half the time based on detrended inception-to-date past market returns, scaled to 10% annualized volatility for comparability. Using daily and monthly data, including monthly BAB returns, for U.S. common stocks and the U.S. stock market since 1931 and for 23 other countries from as early as 1988, all through January 2018, he finds that: (more…)