Senator Lieberman's peeps tried to make Joe-mentum a thing, until he came in fifth in the New Hampshire primary.
And this week something called Yo had yo-mentum, at least until some major security flaws were discovered.
I'm sure momentum will do just fine though.
From Barron's:
A shockingly poor 8% of large-cap growth managers are beating the Russell 1000 Growth Index: That was the statistic a few weeks back. Value managers aren’t doing much better. Add them in and the figure rises to 10%.
What the heck happened? It’s a shift from last year, when more active managers were pulling ahead of the index. If you suspect the early-year undoing of sectors such as social media, biotechnology and others exhibiting great price momentum (until this year), you’re onto something.
Many active fund managers turn out to be riding what quants call the momentum effect. In stocks, like Newtonian physics, an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Until… they’re acted upon by a force. Such as the fear of a plunge in the just-named hot stock-market sectors which gripped investors in February and March and became temporarily something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Colleague Ben Levisohn picked up on the explanation from Nomura quant strategist Joseph Mezrich earlier today. Mezrich notes that quant funds, which don’t gorge as heavily on momentum, weren’t shredded in the same way by the breakdown of this investment factor in early 2014.
As his chart to the right shows, managers are hitting momentum lately like junkies in the crack epidemic:
Although hired for their stock picking skills, fundamental managers have become enormously dependent on momentum as they seek to boost alpha, while quantitative managers’ reliance on momentum has become relatively minor. That is likely the reason quants did not take a performance hit in March and April 2014, when fundamental managers suffered....MORE
