"Liquidity is expensive but illiquidity is much more so, because it destroys the very existence of a firm"I don't remember if it was Johannes or Ernst, it was a long time ago that I read Manchester, quoting one of the Schroeder boys on the insolvency of Krupp. That line has stuck with me. Here's the book.
From ETF.com:
Swedroe: Targeting Liquidity As A Style
During the financial crisis of 2008, even sophisticated investors such as the Yale Endowment fund learned just how expensive liquidity can be when you need it most. So it should come as no surprise that less liquid stocks have outperformed more liquid ones.
There’s a logical, risk-based explanation for that outperformance. Investors demand a premium for taking liquidity risk. Less liquid stocks not only take longer to trade, but transaction costs are likely to be higher as well. That’s especially true if you must purchase liquidity during times of stress in the markets. Thus, investors with long horizons, who are also willing to trade less frequently, can earn an expected risk premium.
Roger G. Ibbotson and Daniel Y.-J. Kim—authors of the July 2014 study “Liquidity as an Investment Style: 2014 Update”—examined whether liquidity as an investment style meets the four criteria set down in 1992 by Nobel Prize winner William Sharpe.HT: Abnormal Returns
According to those criteria, a benchmark investment style must be: identifiable before the fact; not easily beaten; a viable alternative; and low in cost. Using stock turnover as a measure of liquidity, the study analyzed the top 3,500 U.S. stocks from 1971 through 2013. Following is a summary of the authors’ findings:
- First, the previous year’s turnover of stocks is identifiable before the fact. It’s also simple, easy to measure and has a significant impact on returns.
- Second, liquidity is a distinct and viable alternative to the factors of size, value and momentum, because its impact is additive to each of them.
- Third, first-quartile portfolios constructed using liquidity, momentum, size and value investment styles outperform the equally weighted universe portfolio.
- The low-liquidity quartile portfolio outperforms both the smallest-cap portfolio and the high-momentum portfolio, producing returns that are indeed “hard to beat.”
- The low-liquidity portfolios also generate statistically significant alphas in Fama-French four-factor models. The authors also found that as less liquid stocks become more liquid, their returns increase dramatically, and vice versa.
- However, migration cannot be known ex-ante. They write: “Nevertheless, these results demonstrate that changes in liquidity strongly correlate with changes in valuation.”
Interestingly, the authors also found that there’s “little evidence that styles are related to risk, at least as measured by standard deviation.” For example, for value and momentum, the first quartile is less risky than the fourth-quartile portfolio....MORE
- Fourth, forming portfolios once a year resulted in 78 percent of the high-performing, low-liquidity quartile of stocks remaining in that quartile. Thus, the liquidity portfolio doesn’t exhibit high turnover, helping to keep costs low. That’s especially true if one is a patient trader and refrains from forcing trades, such as index funds do on reconstitution dates.
