The Value Investing Disconnect | Chief Investment Officer

The Research Affiliates Challenge: Two anonymous investment strategies compared side-by-side over a 53-year time span. One delivered annualized excess returns of 2.9% at an annualized risk of 16.3%. The other, 1.8% excess returns and 4.3% risk.

Another difference? The first—a buy-and-hold investment in the S&P 500—represented 60% of the average plan’s stock and bond holdings. The second—a value investing approach—made up just 20%.

“Owners of capital should be demanding an overwhelming value bias in their portfolios.”“Value investing is increasingly overlooked as a meaningful contributor in portfolio construction,” wrote Research Affiliates’ John West and Amie Ko. “For many investors, [it] is actually viewed as a risk to be diversified away.”

In a report published this month, the pair tackled the question of why value investing has fallen out of favor in institutional portfolios—while a bias toward equity remains “conventional wisdom in its ability to generate a reliable source of excess return.”

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In comparing the two strategies, West and Ko found that the value strategy had a higher win rate over rolling 15- and 3-year periods, as well as smaller excess losses in worst-case return scenarios.

“There seems to be a disconnect,” they wrote. “Owners of capital should be demanding an overwhelming value bias in their portfolios.”

The duo suggested that the current disdain for value is the result of cognitive bias. Soaring stock prices between 1970 and 2015, for example, has led to equities being viewed positively by today’s investors, resulting in a widespread belief in “stocks for the long run.” Value investing, meanwhile, has been “far less buoyant, and the range of outcomes much more modest” over the same 45-year period—causing investors to associate the strategy with less than stellar performance.

But equity outperformance “loses much of its punch” when rising valuations are taken into account, West and Ko argued. Annualized excess returns dropped from 2.8% to 0.8% on a rolling 15-year basis, while the corresponding win rate fell from 82% to just 43%.

The performance of value investments, meanwhile, slightly improved after adjusting for valuation changes—suggesting “the presence of historical structural alpha, not at all reliant on becoming more expensive,” the authors wrote.

“We should acknowledge that cognitive biases may surreptitiously influence our investment decision making,” West and Ko concluded. “We owe it ourselves to question why all long-term sources of excess return are not treated equally in our portfolios.”

In the never-ending hunt for alpha, hedge funds are seeking an information advantage from what is perhaps an obvious source: the news.

Of all finance professionals, hedge fund managers are among the fastest and most active consumers of news—and the most likely to trade based on what they learn, found Harvard University PhD candidate Anastassia Fedyk.

“They are disproportionately more likely to be the first to read any given piece of financial news,” she wrote, adding that consumption of news by hedge fund managers was “strongly related to trading volumes and security return dynamics.”

For the study, Fedyk analyzed click data collected between March 22, 2014 and March 2, 2015 for 3.5 million online articles tied to US stocks. The dataset included hundreds of thousands of readers employed by firms in 21 financial, media, and government sectors.

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Hedge fund managers accounted for just 8% of all readers—but were the first to consume more than 27% of all articles. These professionals were also among the most voracious readers, consuming an average of 531 news stories each over the year. The average investment manager, meanwhile, read just 261 articles.

Fedyk further found that hedge fund employees were better at identifying breaking news: Roughly 18% of hedge fund clicks were on new articles, compared to an average of 16% for other reader groups.

“They are less likely to click on stale news stories than readers from most other industries,” she said.

For every standard deviation increase in after-hours news consumption, next day trading volume for hedge funds increased by 2.1% to 2.3%. Absolute abnormal returns for that trading period also increased by 21 to 23 basis points—although Fedyk did not find conclusive evidence on whether or not these short-term returns actually translated to long-term performance.

“Hedge fund readers… are not only more sophisticated than other investors in terms of their news consumption,” she concluded, “but also more influential in transmitting the information into market outcomes.”

Read the full report, “News Consumption: From Information to Returns.”

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