From Morningstar:
Industry tilts appear to pay off for momentum but are not integral to the success of value and low-volatility strategies.
In the world of factor investing, industry tilts are often an afterthought. Factor investment strategies systematically target stocks with characteristics that have historically been associated with better risk-adjusted performance. But they often end up with industry weightings that differ from the market's. This article summarizes a study Morningstar conducted to evaluate whether such industry tilts contribute to the success of value, momentum, and low-volatility factor strategies, or whether they are an uncompensated source of risk. The full article is available in the Research Library on Morningstar's corporate website....MORE
Summary
The results of this study suggest that:
Research Design
- Value and low-volatility investment strategies demonstrate persistent industry tilts, which do not significantly enhance their performance. Investors can reduce active risk without significantly hindering performance by constraining these factors' industry tilts.
- Momentum strategies perform best when industry weightings are left unconstrained. This is because momentum's industry weightings are dynamic, allowing it to effectively capture short-term persistence in industry performance leadership.
To assess whether an industry-relative approach to factor investing is prudent, this study investigates whether tilting toward industries with stronger value, low-volatility, and momentum characteristics provides better performance. In that vein, we constructed value, momentum, and low-volatility factor strategies applied to both individual stocks and entire industries. Each factor strategy measures 50 years of monthly returns from December 1966 through November 2016, using data from the French Data Library. The stock-level factors ignore industry membership, so they can have industry tilts that may contribute to their performance. However, comparing the performance of the stock- and industry-level factor strategies helps illustrate the impact of those industry tilts. The French Data Library sorts all U.S. stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, and Nasdaq exchange into deciles at the end of June each year based on their book/price ratios from the prior year-end. We measured the stock-level value factor performance as the return difference between a market-cap-weighted portfolio of stocks in the cheapest five deciles and those in the most expensive five deciles....
Previously:
Asness et al: "Contrarian Factor Timing is Deceptively Difficult"
"Investing: Cliff Asness Blasts Rob Arnott"
