Programming Languages for Quants

Programming Languages for Quants

Jayati WALIA

In this article, Jayati WALIA (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022) presents an overview of popular programming languages used in quantitative finance.

Introduction

Finance as an industry has always been very responsive to new technologies. The past decades have witnessed the inclusion of innovative technologies, platforms, mathematical models and sophisticated algorithms solve to finance problems. With tremendous data and money involved and low risk-tolerance, finance is becoming more and more technological and data science, blockchain and artificial intelligence are taking over major decision-making strategies by the power of high processing computer algorithms that enable us to analyze enormous data and run model simulations within nanoseconds with high precision.

This is exactly why programming is a skill which is increasingly in demand. Programming is needed to analyze financial data, compute financial prices (like options or structured products), estimate financial risk measures (like VaR) and test investment strategies, etc. Now we will see an overview of popular programming languages used in modelling and solving problems in the quantitative finance domain.

Python

Python is general purpose dynamic high level programming language (HLL). It’s effortless readability and straightforward syntax allows not just the concept to be expressed in relatively fewer lines of code but also makes it’s learning curve less steep.

Python possesses some excellent libraries for mathematical applications like statistics and quantitative functions such as numpy, scipy and scikit-learn along with the plethora of accessible open source libraries that add to its overall appeal. It supports multiple programming approaches such as object-oriented, functional, and procedural styles.

Python is most popular for data science, machine learning and AI applications. With data science becoming crucial in the financial services industry, it has consequently created an immense demand for Python, making it a programming language of top choice.

C++

The finance world has been dominated by C++ for valid reasons. C++ is one of the essential programming languages in the fintech industry owing to its execution speed. Developers can leverage C++ when they need to programme with advanced computations with low latency in order to process multiple functions fasters such as in High Frequency Trading (HFT) systems. This language offers code reusability (which is crucial in multiple complex quantitative finance projects) to programmers with a diverse library comprising of various tools to execute.

Java

Java is known for its reliability, security and logical architecture with its object-oriented programming to solve complicated problems in the finance domain. Java is heavily used in the sell-side operations of finance involving projects with complex infrastructures and exceptionally robust security demands to run on native as well as cross-platform tools. This language can help manage enormous sets of real-time data with the impeccable security in bookkeeping activity. Financial institutions, particularly investment banks, use Java and C# extensively for their entire trading architecture, including front-end trading interfaces, live data feeds and at times derivatives’ pricing.

R

R is an open source scripting language mostly used for statistical computing, data analytics and visualization along with scientific research and data science. R the most popular language among mathematical data miners, researchers, and statisticians. R runs and compiles on multiple platforms such as Unix, Windows and MacOS. However, it is not the easiest of languages to learn and uses command line scripting which may be complex to code for some.

Scala

Scala is a widely used programming language in banks with Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan and HSBC are among many. Scala is particularly appropriate for banks’ front office engineering needs requiring functional programming (programs using only pure functions that are functions that always return an immutable result). Scala provides support for both object-oriented and functional programming. It is a powerful language with an elegant syntax.

Haskell and Julia

Haskell is a functional and general-purpose programming language with user-friendly syntax, and a wide collection of real-world libraries for user to develop the quant solving application using this language. The major advantage of Haskell is that it has high performance, is robust and is useful for modelling mathematical problems and programming language research.

Julia, on the other hand, is a dynamic language for technical computing. It is suitable for numerical computing, dynamic modelling, algorithmic trading, and risk analysis. It has a sophisticated compiler, numerical accuracy with precision along with a functional mathematical library. It also has a multiple dispatch functionality which can help define function behavior across various argument combinations. Julia communities also provide a powerful browser-based graphical notebook interface to code.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

   ▶ Jayati WALIA Quantitative Finance

   ▶ Jayati WALIA Quantitative Risk Management

   ▶ Jayati WALIA Value at Risk

   ▶ Akshit GUPTA The Black-Scholes-Merton model

Useful Resources

Websites

QuantInsti Python for Trading

Bankers by Day Programming languages in FinTech

Julia Computing Julia for Finance

R Examples R Basics

About the author

The article was written in October 2021 by Jayati WALIA (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022).

The Warren Buffett Indicator

The Warren Buffett Indicator

Youssef EL QAMCAOUI

In this article, Youssef EL QAMCAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Master in Strategy & Management of International Business (SMIB), 2020-2021) discusses the Warren Buffett Indicator.

It is no secret that stock prices are all-time highs and people have been asking the important question: are we in a stock market bubble? According to the Warren Buffett Indicator, the answer to that question is YES.

Let’s discuss what exactly the Warren Buffett Indicator is, why it is showing that this stock market is the most overvalued in history and why the stock market would have to fall by more than 50% to be considered fairly valued based on historical averages.

Definition and origin of the Warren Buffett Indicator

The Warren Buffett Indicator is defined as the ratio between the US Wilshire 5000 index to US Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In other words, it is the American stock market valuation to US GDP divided by the size of the American economy.

It is used to determine how cheap or expensive the stock market is at a given point in time. It was named after the legendary investor Warren Buffett who called in 2001 the ratio “the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment”. It is widely followed by the financial media and investors as a valuation measure for the US stock market and has hit an all-time high in 2021.

To calculate the Warren Buffett Indicator, we need to get data for both metrics: the US Wilshire 5000 index and the US GDP.

The US Wilshire 5000 index

To determine the total stock market value of the US, Warren Buffett uses the Wilshire 5000 index. This index is a broad-based market capitalization weighted index composed of 3,451 publicly traded companies that meet the following criteria:

  • The companies are headquartered in the United States.
  • The stocks are listed and actively traded on a US stock exchange.
  • The stocks have pricing information that is widely available to the public.

The Wilshire 5000 index is a better measure of the total value of the US stock market than other more popular stock market indices such as the S&P500 the Dow Jones or the NASDAQ. In the case of the S&P500, it only measures the 500 largest US companies. The Dow Jones has only 30 component companies and the NASDAQ consists of mostly tech companies and excludes companies listed on the NYSE. On the other hand, the Wilshire 5000 is often used as a benchmark for the entirety of the US stock market and is widely regarded as the best single measure of the overall US equity market.

In 2021, the market capitalization of the Wilshire 5000 is approximately 47.1 trillion dollars.

The US GDP

The US GDP which represents the total production of the US economy. It is measured quarterly by the US Government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. The GDP is a static measurement of prior economic activity meaning it does not forecast the future or include any expectation or evaluation of future economic activity or growth. In 2021, the US GDP is 22.7 trillion dollars.

The Warren Buffett Indicator

Knowing the value of the US Wilshire 5000 index and the value of the US GDP, we can compute the value of the Warren Buffett Indicator:

(47.1 / 22.7)*100 = 207.5%.

Without any historical context this number doesn’t say anything so let’s dive into it.

Evolution of the Warren Buffett Indicator

Figure 1 gives the evolution of the Warren Buffett Indicator over the period 1987-2021. This figure underlines how extremely high the Warren Buffett Indicator currently is compared to historical averages.

Figure 1. The Warren Buffett Indicator (1987-2021).

 History Warren Buffet Indicator
Source: www.longtermtrends.net

The Warren Buffett Indicator at 207% is tremendously higher than periods that turned out to be huge market bubbles such as “.com” bubble in March of 2000 where the Warren Buffett Indicator topped out at 140%. Even at the top of the housing bubble in October 2007 looks significantly tame at 104% compared to today’s level of nearly double that.

Since 1970, the average Warren Buffett Indicator reading has been at around 85%. In fact, for the stock market to be considered fairly valued based on historical averages, the total value of the stock market would have to fall to 19.3 trillion, far from the current value of 47.1 trillion. This means it would take a 60% stock market crash for the Warren Buffett Indicator to fall back to its historical average of 85%.

Use of the Warren Buffett Indicator for investment

But what does this mean for future investing returns? Over the last 10 years the S&P500 returns have been extremely strong at an average of 12.5% per year – well above historical trends.

Let’s look at how Warren Buffett used the thinking around the Warren Buffett Indicator to help make predictions about future returns from the stock market during these crazy times. Warren Buffett has been known to be hesitant about making predictions about the stock market but there have been a few times where Buffett used the Warren Buffett Indicator to help make accurate predictions about the future returns of the stock market in November 1999 when the Dow Jones was at 11,000 – and just a few months before the burst of the dot-com bubble – the stock market gained 13% a year from 1981 to 1998. The Warren Buffett Indicator was at 130% significantly higher than ever before in the past 30 years.

Warren Buffett said at the time that 13% return is impossible if you strip out the inflation component from this nominal return which you would need to do. However, inflation fluctuates that’s 4% in real terms and if 4%.

Two years after the November 1999 article when the Dow Jones was down to 9,000, Warren Buffett stated: “I would expect now to see long-term returns somewhat higher [around] 7% after costs”. He revised his expectations for future returns higher because the Warren Buffett Indicator had come down significantly from its high of 130% in November 1999 to 93% just two years later – meaning stocks were more fairly valued and as a result prospective future returns were higher.

In October 2008, after the S&P500 had fallen from a high of greater than 1,500 in July 2007 to around 900, Warren Buffett wrote “Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade probably by a substantial degree. At that moment, the indicator was at around 60%. This was not a popular prediction and people were selling out of stocks because they were worried about the future. They had seen stock prices fall consistently and wanted to sell out of stocks before they kept falling more. Since Warren Buffett made this call in October 2008, the S&P500 has returned an average annualized return of 14.7% with dividends reinvested. This return is significantly higher than the long-term historical return of the stock market.

To grasp the Warren Buffett Indicator has been a good gauge of future stock market returns, it is needed to understand the reason stocks can’t rise 25% or more a year forever. This is because over the long term, stock market returns are determined by the following:

Interest rate

The higher the interest rate, the greater the downward pole. This is because the rate of return that investors need from any kind of investment is directly tied to the risk-free rate that they can earn from government securities. As Warren Buffett explained: “If the government rate rises the prices of all other investments must adjust downward to a level that brings their expected rates of return into line. If government interest rates fall, the dynamic pushes the prices of all other investments upward”.

Long-term growth of corporate profitability

Over the long-term, corporate profitability reverts to its long-term trend (~6%). During recessions, corporate profit margins shrink and during economic growth periods corporate profit margins expand. Nonetheless, long-term growth of corporate profitability is closely tied to long-term economic growth.

Current market valuation

Over the long run, stock market valuation tends to revert to its historical average. A higher current valuation certainly correlates with lower long-term returns in the future. On the other hand, a lower current valuation correlates with a higher long-term return.

Discussion

That being said there are some points that we add to discuss this perspective.

Historically low interest rates

Figure 2 represents the history of interest rates in the US for the period 1960-2021.

Figure 2. History of interest rates in the US.

History US interest rates
Source: www.macrotrends.net

This figure shows that the current interest rate on 10-year US government bonds has never been so low. This extremely low level of interest rates partially helps to explain the high stock market valuation by historical standards. As Warren Buffet stated: “As interest rates rise stocks become less valuable and as interest rates decrease stock prices increase all else being equal”.

Companies are staying private for longer

As companies stay private for longer, these companies are not included in the value of the stock market. If these companies had decided to go public, the market cap of Wilshire 5000 would be higher as the index currently contains around 3,500 stocks. Since this index only counts publicly traded companies, if large non-publicly traded companies were also included in the value of the index, the value of the Warren Buffet Indicator would increase – although likely not by a large enough factor.

Why should I be interested in this post?

You might be interested in this topic if you are aware or are trying to get knowledge around the stock market and the possible crash that is being discussed in 2021. This might help you understand what the current situation is and why we are talking about this. But it also gives you insights to understand how important this topic can become in the very near future.

Useful resources

Data to compute the Warren Buffett Indicator

Federal Reserve Economic Data US GDP

Federal Reserve Economic Data Wilshire 5000 Full Cap Price Index

Other

Wilshire www.wilshire.com

Current market valuation Buffet Indicator

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

   ▶ Bijal GANDHI Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

   ▶ Rayan AKKAWI Warren Buffet and his basket of eggs

About the author

The article was written in October 2021 by Youssef EL QAMCAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Master in Strategy & Management of International Business (SMIB), 2020-2021).

Smart Beta industry main actors

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents the main actors of the smart beta industry, which is estimated to represent a cumulative market value of $1.9 trillion as of 2017 and is projected to grow to $3.4 trillion by 2022 (BlackRock, 2021).

The structure of this post is as follows: we begin by presenting an overview of the smart beta industry actors. We will then discuss the case of BlackRock, the 10 trillion dollar powerhouse of the asset management industry, which is the main actor in the smart beta industry segment.

Overview of the market

The asset management sector, which is worth 100 trillion dollars worldwide, is primarily divided into active and passive management (BCG, 2021). While active management continues to dominate the market, passive management’s proportion of total assets under managed (AUM) increased by 4 percentage points between 2008 and 2019, reaching 15%. This market transition is even more dramatic in the United States, where passive management accounted for more than 40% of the total market share in 2019. A new category has arisen and begun to acquire market share over the last decade. Smart beta exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are receiving fresh inflows and are the industry’s fastest-growing ETF product. Various players are entering the market by developing and releasing new products (Deloitte, 2021).

Active funds have demonstrated divergent returns when compared to passive funds, making the cost difference increasingly difficult to justify (Figure 1). The growing market share of passive funds in both the United States and the European Union is putting further pressure on active managers’ fees. When it comes to meeting the demands of investors, both active and passive management has shown shortcomings. Active management funds often fail to outperform their benchmarks because they lack clear indicators, charge expensive fees, and don’t always have clear indicators. As seen in Figure 1, active funds struggle to deliver consistent returns over a prolonged timeframe, as depicted in the European market. In this sense, the active funds success rate is divided by more than half between year one and year three (Deloitte, 2021). Concentration is a problem for passive funds that are weighted by market capitalization.. These limits have prepared the ground for smart beta funds to emerge (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Active funds success rates (% of funds beating their index over X years)
Active funds success rates
Source: Deloitte (2021).

The smart beta market is dominated by several players who have a strategic position with a large volume of assets under management. Figure 2 compares smart beta actors based on percentage of asset under management (%AUM), one the most important metric in the asset management industry. Some key elements can be drawn for the first figure. BlackRock is the provider with the largest market share, with over 40% of the smart beta industry in the analysis, followed by Vanguard and State Street Global Advisors with 30.66% and 18.44% respectively in this benchmark study underpinning nearly $1 trillion (Figure 2).

Figure 2. % AUM of the biggest Smart Beta ETF providers
Smart_Beta_benchmark_analysis
Source: etf.com (2021).

BlackRock dominance

The main powerhouses of the passive investing industry, BlackRock and Vanguard, are poised to capture the lion’s share of assets in the rapidly rising world of actively managed exchange-traded funds. The conclusion is likely to dissatisfy active fund managers, who have been squeezed by the fast development of passive ETFs in recent years and may have seen the introduction of active ETFs as a chance to fight back and get a piece of the lucrative pie (Financial Times, 2021).

According to a study of 320 institutional investors with a combined $12.9 trillion in assets, institutional investors prefer BlackRock and Vanguard to handle their active ETF investments. The juggernauts were expected to provide the best performance as well as the best value for money. With over a third of the global ETF market capitalization, BlackRock remains the dominant player (The Financial Times, 2021). BlackRock is unquestionably a major force in the ETF business, with an unparalleled market share in both the US and European ETF markets. BlackRock has expanded to become the world’s largest asset manager, managing funds for everyone from pensioners to oligarchs and sovereign wealth funds. It is now one of the largest stockholders in practically every major American corporation — as well as a number of overseas corporations. It is also one among the world’s largest lenders to businesses and governments.

Aladdin, the company’s technological platform, provides critical wiring for large portions of the worldwide investing industry. By the end of June this year, BlackRock was managing a stunning $9.5 trillion in assets, a sum that would be hardly understandable to most of the 35 million Americans whose retirement accounts were managed by the business in 2020. If the current rate of growth continues, BlackRock’s third-quarter reports on October 13 might disclose that the company’s market capitalization has surpassed $10 trillion. It’s expected to have surpassed that mark by the end of the year (FT, 2021). To put this in perspective, it is about equivalent to the worldwide hedge fund, private equity, and venture capital industries combined.

Industry-wide fee cuts had helped BlackRock maintain its dominance in the ETF sector. Its iShares brand is the industry’s largest ETF provider for both passive and actively managed products (CNBC, 2021).

Why should I be interested in this post?

If you are a business school or university undergraduate or graduate student, this content will help you in understanding the various evolutions of asset management throughout the last decades and in broadening your knowledge of finance.

Smart beta funds have become a trending topic among investors in recent years. Smart beta is a game-changing invention that addresses an unmet need among investors: a higher return for lower risk, net of transaction and administrative costs. In a way, these investment strategies create a new market. As a result, smart beta is gaining traction and influencing the asset management industry.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

Factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Factor Investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Origin of factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI MSCI Factor Indexes

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Smart beta 1.0

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Smart beta 2.0

Factors

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Quality Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Growth Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility Factor

Useful resources

Business analysis

BlackRock, 2021.What is factor investing?

BCG, 2021.The 100$ Trillion Machine: Global Asset Management 2021

CNBC, 2021. What Blackrock’s continued dominance means for other ETF issuers.

Deloitte, 2021. Will smart beta ETFs revolutionize the asset management industry? Understanding smart beta ETFs and their impact on active and passive fund managers

Etf.com, 2021.Smart Beta providers

Financial Times (13/09/2020) BlackRock and Vanguard look set to extend dominance to active ETFs

Financial Times (07/10/2021) The ten trillion dollar man: how Larry Fink became king of Wall St

About the author

The article was written in October 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

MSCI Factor Indexes

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents the MSCI Factor Indexes. MSCI is one of the most prominent actors in the indexing business, with approximately 236 billion dollars in assets benchmarked to the MSCI factor indexes.

The structure of this post is as follows: we begin by introducing MSCI Factor Indexes and the evolution of portfolio performance. We then delve deeper by describing the MSCI Factor Classification Standards (FaCS). We finish by analyzing factor returns over the last two decades.

Definition

Factor

A factor is any component that helps to explain the long-term risk and return performance of a financial asset. Factors have been extensively used in portfolio risk models and in quantitative investment strategies, and documented in academic research. Active fund managers use these characteristics while selecting securities and constructing portfolios. Factor indexes are a quick and easy way to get exposure to several return drivers. Factor investing aims to obtain greater risk-adjusted returns by exposing investors to stock features in a systematic way. Factor investing isn’t a new concept; it’s been utilized in risk models and quantitative investment techniques for a long time. Factors can also explain a portion of fundamental active investors’ long-term portfolio success. MSCI Factor Indexes use transparent and rules-based techniques to reflect the performance characteristics of a variety of investment types and strategies (MSCI Factor Research, 2021).

Performance analysis

Understanding portfolio returns is crucial to determining how to evaluate portfolio performance. It may be traced back to Harry Markowitz’s pioneering work and breakthrough research on portfolio design and the role of diversification in improving portfolio performance. Investors did not discriminate between the sources of portfolio gains throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Long-term portfolio management was dominated by active investment. The popularity of passive investment as an alternative basis for implementation was bolstered by finance research in the 1980s. Through passive allocation, investors began to effectively capture market beta. Investors began to perceive factors as major determinants of long-term success in the 2000s (MSCI Factor Research, 2021). Figure 1 presents the evolution of portfolio performance analysis over time: until the 1960s, based on the CAPM model, returns were explain by one factor only: the market return. Then, the market model was used to assess active portfolio with the alpha measuring the extra performance of the fund manager. Later on in the 2000s, the first evaluation model based on the market factor was augmented with other factors (size, value, etc.).

Figure 1. Evolution of portfolio performance analysis.
Evolution_portfolio_performance
Source: MSCI Research (2021).

MSCI Factor Index

MSCI Factor Classification Standards (FaCS) establishes a standard vocabulary and definitions for factors so that they may be understood by a wider audience. MSCI FaCS is comprised of 6 Factor Groups and 14 factors and is based on MSCI’s Barra Global Equity Factor Model (MSCI Factor Research, 2021) as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Factor decomposition of the different factor strategies.
MSCI_FaCS
Source: MSCI Research (2021).

The MSCI Factor Indexes are based on well-researched academic studies. The MSCI Factor Indexes were identified and developed based on academic results, creating a unified language to describe risk and return via the perspective of factors (MSCI Factor Research, 2021).

Performance of factors over time

Figure 2 compares the MSCI factor indexes’ performance from 1999 to May 2020. All indexes are rebalanced on a 100-point scale to ensure consistency in performance and to facilitate factor comparisons. Over a two-decade period, smart beta factors have all outperformed the MSCI World index, with the MSCI World Minimum Volatility Index as the most profitable factor which has consistently provided excess profits over the long run while (MSCI Factor research, 2021).

Figure 2. Performance of MSCI Factor Indexes during the period 1999-2017.
MSCI_performance
Source: MSCI Research (2021).

Individual factors have consistently outperformed the market over time. Figure 2 represents the performance of the MSCI Factor Indexes for the last two decades compared to the MSCI ACWI, which is MSCI’s flagship global equity index and is designed to represent the performance of large- and mid-cap stocks across 23 developed and 27 emerging markets.

It is possible to make some conclusions regarding the performance of the investment factor over the previous two decades by dissecting the performance of the various factorial strategies. The value factor was the one that drove performance in the first decade of the 2000s. This outperformance is characterized by a movement towards more conservative investment in a growing market environment. The dotcom bubble crash resulted in a bear market, with the minimal volatility approach helping to absorb market shocks in 2002. When it comes to the minimal volatility approach, it is evident that it is highly beneficial during moments of high volatility, acting as a viable alternative to hedging one’s stock market exposure and moving into more safe-haven products. Several times of extreme volatility may be recognized, including the dotcom boom, the US subprime crisis, and the European debt crisis as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Table of performance of MSCI Factor Indexes from 1999-2017.
MSCI_historical_performance
Source: MSCI Research (2021).

Why should I be interested in this post?

If you are a business school or university undergraduate or graduate student, this content will help you in understanding the evolution of asset management throughout the last decades and in broadening your knowledge of finance.

Smart beta funds have become a trending topic among investors in recent years. Smart beta is a game-changing invention that addresses an unmet need among investors: a higher return for lower risk, net of transaction and administrative costs. In a way, these investment strategies create a new market. As a result, smart beta is gaining traction and influencing the asset management industry.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

Factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Factor Investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Origin of factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Smart beta 1.0

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Smart beta 2.0

Factors

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Quality Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Growth Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility Factor

Useful resources

Business analysis

MSCI Factor Research, 2021.MSCI Factor Indexes

MSCI Factor Research, 2021. MSCI Factor Classification Standards (FaCS)

About the author

The article was written in October 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

Carbon Disclosure Rating

Carbon Disclosure Rating

Anant Jain

In this article, Anant JAIN (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022) talks about Carbon Disclosure Rating.

Introduction

Carbon disclosure rating (CDR) is a medium to measure the environment sustainability of a company. It is calculated based on the voluntarily disclosure by a company itself. This rating is useful for an ethical investor who wish to incorporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into their investment decision making process. It focuses on the environmental factor.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria constitute a framework that helps socially conscious investors to screen potential investments which incorporate their personal values/agendas. The ESG criteria screen companies based on sound environmental practices, healthy social responsibilities and moral governance initiatives into their corporate policies and daily operations.

The most commonly used carbon disclosure rating is administered by Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a United Kingdom based non-profit organization. It is comparable with Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) which is a Netherlands based organization. GRI works with businesses and organizations while CDP works with individual companies.

Framework of Carbon Disclosure Rating

Carbon Disclosure Rating is calculated by a general framework based on questionnaire generated by CDP. About 6,800 companies, which participated as of year 2020, usually submit responses to a series of industry specific questions depending on the industry of a specific company. The responses are then evaluated, analyzed, and graded. They are finally made accessible to institutional investors and other interested parties as well.

The grading separate companies based on their comprehension and application of climate-related changes. The grading mention below is stated from CDP.

Figure 1. Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) Scoring Board.
Carbon disclosure rating table
Source: Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) .

A and A- | Leadership level
B and B- | Management level
C and C- | Awareness level
D and D- | Disclosure level
F | Failure to provide sufficient information to be evaluated

CDP then publishes a list of most favorable companies that were graded at “Leadership Level A and A-”. In the year 2020, 313 companies were features on the list. Majority of those companies were large multinational corporations who are a leader in their specific industry. It included many prominent companies, such as Ford Motor Company, Apple, Bank of America, Johnson & Johnson, and Walmart.

Benefits of CDR

There is a constant increasing demand for environmental disclosure due to rise in ethical investing. As a result, there are numerous tangible benefits gained by a company when it discloses the requested informed asked by the CDP. They are as follows:

  • Improve and protect a company’s reputation as it builds confidence via transparency and concern for environment
  • Helps gain a competitive edge while performing on the stock market
  • More preparedness for mandatory environmental reporting regulations
  • Discover new opportunities and mitigate potential risks by identifying emerging environmental risks and opportunities which might have been overlooked otherwise
  • Assessing and tracking progress in comparison to the competition in the same industry

Criticism

The biggest criticism of carbon disclosure rating is that the score does not reflect an honest depiction of the actions taken by a company to alleviate its impact on climate change or reduce its carbon footprint. It may simply reflect a that a company didn’t disclose information with CDP. For instance, Amazon in the year 2020 was given a score “F” by CDP because it did not respond to CDP’s request for information.

Therefore, an “F” score may simply mean that a company failed to provide enough information to receive an evaluation. It does not necessarily mean that company’s inability to reduce its carbon footprint. As a result, CDP’s rating is termed to be inconclusive since many companies do not provide information to CDP on thier actions to reduce their carbon footprint and actions to limit their impact on climate change.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

Useful resources

Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP)

Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)

About the author

The article was written in October 2021 by Anant JAIN (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022).

Smart beta 2.0

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents the concept of Smart beta 2.0, an enhancement of the first generation of smart beta strategies.

The structure of this post is as follows: we begin by defining smart beta 2.0 as a topic. We then discuss then the characteristics of smart beta 2.0.

Definition

“Smart beta 2.0” is an expression introduced by Amenc, Goltz and Martellini (2013) from the EDHEC-Risk Institute. This new vision of smart beta investment intends to empower investors to maximize the performance of their smart beta investments while managing their risk. Rather than offering solely pre-packaged alternatives to equity market-capitalization-weighted indexes, the Smart beta 2.0 methodology enables investors to experiment with multiple smart beta indexes to create a benchmark that matches their own risk preferences, and by extension increase their portfolio diversification overall.

Characteristics of smart beta 2.0 strategies

The main characteristic of smart beta 2.0 strategies compared to smart beta 1.0 strategies is portfolio diversification.

If factor-tilted strategies (i.e., portfolios with a part specifically invested in factor strategies) do not consider a diversification-based goal, they may result in very concentrated portfolios in order to achieve their factor tilts. Investors have lately started to integrate factor tilts with diversification-based weighting methods to create well-diversified portfolios using a flexible strategy known as Smart beta 2.0 (EDHEC-Risk Institute, 2016).

This method, in particular, enables the creation of factor-tilted indexes that are also adequately diversified by using a diversification-based weighting scheme. Because it combines the smart weighting scheme with the explicit factor tilt (Amenc et al., 2014), this strategy is also known as “smart factor investment”. In order to achieve extra value-added, investors are increasingly focusing on allocation choices across factor investing techniques.

The basic foundation for the smart beta has been substantially outstripped by its success with institutional investors. It is clear that market-capitalization-weighted indices have no counterpart when it comes to capturing market fluctuations (Amenc et al., 2013). Even the harshest detractors of market-capitalization-weighted, in the end, use market-capitalization-weighted indices to assess the success of their own new indexes (Amenc et al., 2013). In fact, because smart beta strategies outperform market-capitalization-weighted indexes, the great majority of investors are likely to pick them. While everyone believes cap-weighted indexes provide the most accurate representation of the market, they do not always provide an efficient benchmark that can be used as a reference for a strategic allocation. It’s worth noting that smart beta 2.0 seeks to close the gap in terms of exposure to factors from the first generation, but it doesn’t guarantee outperformance over market-capitalization-weighted strategies (Amenc et al., 2013).

Why should I be interested in this post?

If you are a business school or university undergraduate or graduate student, this content will help you in understanding the evolution of asset management during the last decades and in broadening your knowledge of finance.

Smart beta funds have become a hot issue among investors in recent years. Smart beta is a game-changing invention that addresses an unmet need among investors: a higher return for lower risk, net of transaction and administrative costs. In a way, these strategies (smart beta 1.0 and then smart beta 2.0) have created a new market. As a result, smart beta is gaining traction and influencing the asset management industry.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

Factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Factor Investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Origin of factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Smart beta 1.0

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Alternatives to market-capitalization weighting strategies

Factors

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Quality Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Growth Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility Factor

Useful resources

Amenc, N., F., Goltz, F., Le Sourd, V., 2016. Investor perception about Smart beta ETF. EDHEC-Risk Institute working paper.

Amenc, N., F., Goltz, F., Martellini, L., 2013. Smart beta 2.0. EDHEC-Risk Institute working paper.

Amenc, N., F., Goltz, F., Martinelli, L., Deguest, R., Lodh, A., Shirbini, E., 2014. Risk Allocation, Factor Investing and Smart Beta: Reconciling Innovations in Equity Portfolio Construction. EDHEC-Risk Institute working paper.

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

Smart Beta 1.0

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents the concept of the smart beta 1.0, the first generation of alternative indexing investment strategies that created a new approach in the asset management industry.

This post is structured as follows: we start by defining smart beta 1.0 as a topic. Finally, we discuss an empirical study by Motson, Clare and Thomas (2017) emphasizing the origin of smart beta.

Definition

The “Smart Beta” expression is commonly used in the asset management industry to describe innovative indexing investment strategies that are alternatives to the market-capitalization-weighted investment strategy (buy-and-hold). In terms of performance, the smart beta “1.0” approach outperforms market-capitalization-based strategies. According to Amenc et al. (2016), the latter have a tendency for concentration and unrewarded risk, which makes them less appealing to investors. In finance, “unrewarded risk” refers to taking on more risk without receiving a return that is commensurate to the increased risk.

When smart beta techniques were first introduced, they attempted to increase portfolio diversification over highly concentrated and capitalization-weighted, as well as to capture the factor premium available in equity markets, such as value indices or fundamentally weighted indices which aim to capture the value premium. While improving capitalization-weighted indices is important, concentrating just on increasing diversity or capturing factor exposure may result in a less than optimal outcome. The reason for this is that diversification-based weighting systems will always result in implicit exposure to certain factors, which may have unintended consequences for investors who are unaware of their implicit factor exposures. Unlike the second generation of Smart Beta, the first generation of Smart Beta are integrated systems that do not distinguish between stock selection and weighting procedures. The investor is therefore required to be exposed to certain systemic risks, which are the source of the investor’s poor performance.

Thus, the first-generation Smart Beta indices are frequently prone to value, small- or midcap, and occasionally contrarian biases, since they deconcentrate cap weighted indices, which are often susceptible to momentum and large growth risk. Furthermore, distinctive biases on risk indicators that are unrelated to deconcentration but important to the factor’s objectives may amplify these biases even further. Indexes that are fundamentally weighted, for example, have a value bias because they apply accounting measures that are linked to the ratios that are used to construct value indexes.

Empirical study: monkeys vs passive mangers

Andrew Clare, Nick Motson, and Steve Thomas assert that even monkey-created portfolios outperform cap-weighted benchmarks in their study (Motson et al., 2017). A lack of variety in cap-weighting is at the foundation of the problem. The endless monkey theory states that a monkey pressing random keys on a typewriter keyboard for an unlimited amount of time will almost definitely type a specific text, such as Shakespeare’s whole works. For 500 businesses, there is an infinite number of portfolio weighting options totaling 100%; some will outperform the market-capitalization-weighted index, while others will underperform. The authors of the study take the company’s ticker symbol and use the following guidelines to create a Scrabble score for each stock:

  • A, E, I, O, U, L, N, S, T, R – 1 point. D and G both get two points.
  • B, C, M, P – 3 points ; F, H, V, W, Y – 4 points ; K – 5 points.
  • J, X – 8 points ; Q, Z – 10 points

The scores of each company’s tickers are then added together and divided by this amount to determine each stock’s weight in the index. As illustrated in Figure 1, the results obtained are astonishing, resulting in a clear outperformance of the randomly generated portfolios compared to the traditional market capitalization index by 1.5% premium overall.

Figure 1. Result of the randomly generated portfolio with the Cass Scrabble as underlying rule compared to market-capitalization portfolio performance.
Scrabble_performance
Source: Motson et al. (2017).

In the same line, the authors produced 500 weights that add up to one using this technique, with a minimum increase of 0.2 percent. The weights are then applied to a universe of 500 equities obtained from Bloomberg in December 2015 (Motson et al., 2017). The performance of the resultant index is then calculated over the next twelve months. This technique was performed ten million times. As illustrated in Figure 2, the results are striking, with smart beta funds outperforming nearly universally in the 10 million simulations run overall, and with significant risk-adjusted return differences (Motson et al., 2017).

Figure 2. 10 million randomly generated portfolios based on a portfolio construction of 500 stocks
Scrabble_performance
Source: Motson et al. (2017).

For performance analysis, the same method was employed, but this time for a billion simulation. This means they constructed one billion 500-stock indexes with weights set at random or as if by a monkey. Figure 9 suggests that the outcome was not accidental. The black line shows the distribution of 1 billion monkeys’ returns in 2016, while the grey line shows the cumulative frequency. 88 percent of the monkeys outperformed the market capitalization benchmark, according to the graph. The luckiest monkey returned 27.2 percent, while the unluckiest monkey returned just 3.83 percent (Motson et al., 2017) (Figure 3).

FFigure 3. Result of one billion randomly simulated portfolios based on a portfolio construction of 500 stocks.
Scrabble_performance
Source: Motson et al. (2017).

Why should I be interested in this post?

If you are a business school or university undergraduate or graduate student, this content will help you in understanding the various evolutions of asset management throughout the last decades and in broadening your knowledge of finance.

If you’re an investor, you’re probably aware that smart beta funds have become a popular topic. Smart beta is a game-changing development that fills a gap in the market for investors: a better return for a reduced risk, net of transaction and administrative costs. These strategies, in a sense, establish a new market. As a result, smart beta is gaining traction and having an impact on asset management.

Related posts on the SimSrade blog

Factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Factor Investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Origin of factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Smart beta 2.0

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Alternatives to market-capitalisation weighted indexes

Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Quality Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Growth Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility Factor

Useful resources

Academic research

Amenc, N., F., Goltz, F. and Le Sourd, V., 2016. Investor perception about Smart beta ETF. EDHEC Risk Institute working paper.

Amenc, N., F., Goltz, F. and Martinelli, L., 2013. Smart beta 2.0. EDHEC Risk Institute working paper.

Motson, N., Clare, A. & Thomas, S., 2017. Was 2016 the year of the monkey?. Cass Business School research paper.

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

Alternative to market-capitalization weighting strategies

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents the different alternatives developed to the market-capitalization weighting strategy (buy-and-hold strategy).

The structure of this post is as follows: we begin by introducing alternatives to market capitalization strategies as a topic. We then will delve deeper by presenting heuristic-based weighting and optimization-based weighting strategies.

Introduction

The basic rule of applying a market-capitalization weighting methodology for the development of indexes has recently come under fire. As the demand for indices as investment vehicles has grown, different weighting systems have emerged. There have also been a number of recent projects for non-market-capitalization-weighted ETFs. Since the first basic factor weighted ETF was released in May 2000, a slew of ETFs has been released to monitor non-market-cap-weighted indexes, including equal-weighted ETFs, minimal variance ETFs, characteristics-weighted ETFs, and so on. These are dubbed “Smart Beta ETFs” since they aim to outperform traditional market-capitalization-based indexes in terms of risk-adjusted returns (Amenc et al. 2016).

The categorization approach will be the same as Chow, Hsu, Kalesnik, and Little (2011), with the following distinctions: 1) basic weighting techniques (heuristic-based weighting) and 2) more advanced quantitative weighting techniques (optimization-based weighting).

It’s an arbitrary categorization system designed to make reading easier by differentiating between simpler and more complicated approaches.

Heuristic-based weighting strategies

Equal-weighting

The equal weighting method assigns the same weight to each share making up the portfolio (or index)

EW_index

Where wi represents the weight of asset i in the portfolio and N the total number of assets in the portfolio.

Because each component of the portfolio has the same weight, equal weighting helps investors to obtain more exposure to smaller firms. Bigger firms will be more represented in the market-capitalization-weighted portfolio since their weight will be larger. The benefit of this technique is that tiny capitalization risk-adjusted-performance tends to be better than big capitalization (Banz, 1981).

In their study, Arnott, Kalesnik, Moghtader, and Scholl (2010) created three distinct indices in terms of index composition. The first group consists of enterprises with substantial market capitalization (as are capitalisation-weighted indices). Each business in the index is then given equal weight. This is how the majority of equally-weighted indexes are built (MSCI World Equal Index, S&P500 Equal Weight Index). The second is to create an index based on basic criteria and then assign equal weight to each firm. The third strategy is a hybrid of the first two. It entails averaging the ranks from the two preceding approaches and then assigning equal weight to the remaining 1000 shares.

Fundamental-weighting

The weighting approach based on fundamentals divides companies into categories based on their basic size. Sales, cash flow, book value, and dividends are all taken into account. These four parameters are used to determine the top 1,000 firms, and each firm in the index is given a weight based on the magnitude of their individual components (Arnott et al., 2005). The portfolio weight of the ith stock is defined as:

Fundamental_indexing

For a fundamental index that includes book value as a consideration, for example, the top 1,000 companies in the market with the most extensive book values are chosen. Firm xi is given a weight wi, which is equal to the firm’s book value divided by the total of the index components’ book values.

Fundamental indexation tries to address the following bias: in a cap-weighted index, if the market efficiency hypothesis is not validated and a share’s price is, for example, overpriced (greater than its fair value), the share’s weight in the index will be too high. Weighting by fundamentals will reduce the bias of over/underweighting over/undervalued companies based on criteria like sales, cash flows, book value, and dividends, which are not affected by market opinion, unlike capitalization.

Low beta weighting

Low-beta strategies are based on the fact that equities with a low beta have greater returns than those expected by the CAPM (Haugen and Heins, 1975). A beta of less than one indicates that the share price has tended to grow less than its benchmark index during bullish trends and to decrease less severely during negative trends throughout the observed timeframe. A low-beta index is created by selecting low-beta stocks and then giving each stock equal weight in the index. As a result, it’s a hybrid of a low-beta and an equal-weighting method. On the other side, high beta strategies enable investors to profit from the amplification of favourable market moves.

Reverse-capitalization weighting

The weight of an asset capitalization-weighted index can be defined as:

CW_index

where MC stands for “Market Capitalization”, and wi is the weight of asset i in the portfolio.

In a reverse market-capitalization-weighted index, the weight of an asset is defined as:

RCW

“Reverse market-capitalization” is abbreviated as RMC. This technique necessitates using a cap-weighted index to execute the approach. RCW methods, like equal-weight or low-beta strategies, are motivated by the fact that small caps have a greater risk-adjusted return than big caps. This sort of indexation requires constant rebalancing (Banz, 1981).

Maximum diversification

This technique aims to build a portfolio with as much diversification as feasible. A diversity index (DI) is employed to achieve the desired outcome, which is defined as the distance between the sum of the constituents’ volatilities and the portfolio’s volatility (Amenc, Goltz, and Martellini, 2013). Diversity weighting is one of the better-known portfolio heuristics that blend cap weighting and equal weighting. Fernholz (1995) defined stock market diversity, Dp, as

Diversity_Index(DI)_1

where p between (0,1) and x Market,i is the weight of the ith stock in the cap-weighted market portfolio, and then proposed a strategy of portfolio weighting whereby portfolio weights are defined as

Diversity_Index(DI)_2

where i = 1, . . . , N; p between (0,1); and the parameter p targets the desired level of portfolio tracking error against the cap-weighted index.

Optimization-based weighting strategies

The logic of Modern Portfolio Theory (Markowitz, 1952) is followed in Mean-Variance optimization. Theoretically, if we know the expected returns of all stocks and their variance-covariance matrix, we can construct risk-adjusted-performance optimal portfolios. However, these two inputs for the model are difficult to estimate precisely in practice. Chopra and Ziemba (1993) showed that even little inaccuracies in these parameters’ estimates may have a large influence on risk-adjusted-performance.

Minimum Variance

Chopra and Ziemba (1993) adopt the simple premise that all stocks have the same return expectation, based on the fact that stock return expectations are difficult to quantify. As a result of this premise, the best portfolio is the one that minimizes risk. The goal of minimal variance strategies, which have been around since 1990, is to provide a better risk-return profile by lowering portfolio risk without modifying return expectations. The low volatility anomaly justifies this technique. Low-volatility stocks have historically outperformed high-volatility equities. These portfolios are built without using a benchmark as a guide. The portfolio variance minimization equation for a two-asset portfolio is as follows:

MPT

In their research on the construction of this type of index, Arnott, Kalesnik, Moghtader and Scholl (2010) found that risk measures that take into account interest rates, oil prices, geographical region, sector, size, expected return, and growth, as calculated by the Northfield global risk model, a model for making one-year risk forecasts, reduce the portfolio’s absolute risk. This method is used in the MSCI World Minimum Volatility Index, which was released in 2008.

Global Minimum Variance, Maximum Decorrelation, and Diversified Minimum Variance are the three types of minimum variance techniques (Amenc, Goltz and Martellini, 2013). However, there are no indexes or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) based on the Maximum Decorrelation and Diversified Minimum Variance methods in actuality; they are still only theoretical notions.

Maximum Sharpe ratio

Because all stocks are unlikely to have the same expected returns, the minimum-variance portfolio—or any practical representation of its concept—is unlikely to have the highest ex-ante Sharpe ratio. Investors must incorporate useful information about future stock returns into a minimum-variance approach to improve it. Choueifaty and Coignard (2008) proposed a simple linear relationship between the expected premium, E(Ri) – Rf, for a stock and its return volatility, sigmai:

MSR_strategy

A related portfolio method proposed by Amenc, Goltz, Martellini, and Retkowsky (2010) implies that a stock’s expected returns are linearly related to its downside semi-volatility. They claimed that portfolio losses are more important to investors than gains. As a result, rather than volatility, risk premium should be connected to downside risk (semi-deviation below zero). The EDHEC-Risk Efficient Equity Indices are built around this assumption. Downside semi-volatility can be defined mathematically as

MSR_Semi_volatility

where Ri, t is the return for stock i in period t.

Maximum Sharpe ratio can be considered as an alternative beta technique that aims to solve the challenges of forecasting risks and returns for a large number of equities.

Why should I be interested in this post?

If you are a business school or university undergraduate or graduate student, this content will help you in understanding the various evolutions of asset management throughout the last decades and in broadening your knowledge of finance.

Smart beta funds have become a hot issue among investors in recent years. Smart beta is a game-changing invention that addresses an unmet need among investors: a higher return for lower risk, net of transaction and administrative costs. In a way, these investment strategies create a new market. As a result, smart beta is gaining traction and influencing the asset management industry.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

Factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Factor Investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Origin of factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Smart beta 1.0

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Smart beta 2.0

Factors

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Quality Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Growth Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility Factor

Useful resources

Academic research

Amenc, Noël, Felix Goltz, Lionel Martellini, and Patrice Ret- kowsky. 2010. “Efficient Indexation: An Alternative to Cap- Weighted Indices.” EDHEC-Risk Institute (February).

Amenc, N., Goltz, F., Le Sourd, V., 2016. Investor perception about Smart beta ETF. EDHEC Risk Institute working paper.

Amenc, N., Goltz, F., Martinelli, L., 2013. Smart beta 2.0. EDHEC Risk Institute working paper.

Arnot, R.D., Hsu, J., Moore, P., 2005. Fundamental Indexation. Financial Analysts Journal, 61(2):83-98.

Arnot, R.D., Kalesnik, V., Moghtader, P., Scholl, S., 2010. Beyond Cap Weight, The empirical evidence for a diversified beta. Journal of Indexes, January, 16-29.

Banz, R., 1981. The relationship between return and market value of common stocks. Journal of Financial Economics. 9(1):3-18.

Chopra, V., Ziemba, W., 1993. The Effect of Errors in Means, Variances, and Covariances on Optimal Portfolio Choice. Journal of Portfolio Management, 19:6-11.

Chow, T., Hsu, J., Kalesnik, V., Little, B., 2011. A Survey of Alternative Equity Index Strategies. Financial Analyst Journal, 67(5):35-57.

Choueifaty, Yves, and Yves Coignard. 2008. Toward Maximum Diversification. Journal of Portfolio Management, vol. 35, no. 1 (Fall):40–51.

Fernholz, Robert. 1995. Portfolio Generating Functions. Working paper, INTECH (December).

Haugen, R., Heins, J., 1975. Risk and Rate of Return of Financial Assets: Some Old Wine in New Bottles. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 10(5):775-784.

Markowitz, H., 1952. Portfolio Selection. The Journal of Finance, 7(1):77-91.

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

Markowitz Modern Portfolio Theory

Markowitz Modern Portfolio Theory

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory, a pioneering framework for understanding the impact of the number of stocks in a portfolio and their covariance relationships on portfolio diversification.

We begin by presenting Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) as the origin of factor investing (market factor). The assumptions of the model are then discussed. We’ll go through some of the model’s fundamental concepts next. We wrap up with a discussion of the concept’s limitations and a general conclusion.

Modern Portfolio Theory

The work conducted by Markowitz is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in financial economics and corporate finance for his theoretical implications and its application in financial markets. In 1990, Markowitz shared the Nobel Prize for his contributions to these domains, which he articulated in his 1952 article “Portfolio Selection” published in The Journal of Finance. His seminal work laid the groundwork for what is now often referred to as ‘Modern Portfolio Theory’ (MPT).

Modern portfolio theory was first introduced by the work of Harry Markowitz in 1952. Overall, the risk component of MPT can be quantified using various mathematical formulations and mitigated through the concept of diversification, which entails carefully selecting a weighted collection of investment assets that collectively exhibit lower risk characteristics than any single asset or asset class. Diversification is, in fact, the central notion of MPT and is predicated on the adage “never put all your eggs in one basket”.

Assumptions of the Markowitz Portfolio Theory

MPT is founded on several market and investor assumptions. Several of these assumptions are stated explicitly, while others are implied. Markowitz’s contributions to MPT in portfolio selection are based on the following basic assumptions:

  • Investors are rational (they seek to maximize returns while minimizing risk).
  • Investors will accept increased risk only if compensated with higher expected returns.
  • Investors receive all pertinent information regarding their investment decision in a timely manner.
  • Investors can borrow or lend an unlimited amount of capital at a risk-free rate of interest.

Concepts used in the MPT

Risk

Risk is equivalent to volatility in Markowitz’ portfolio selection theory—the larger the portfolio volatility, the greater the risk. Volatility is a term that refers to the degree of risk or uncertainty associated with the magnitude of variations in a security’s value. Risk is the possibility that an investment’s actual return will be less than predicted, which is technically quantified by standard deviation. A larger standard deviation implies a bigger risk and, hence, a larger potential return. If investors are prepared to take on risk, they anticipate earning a risk premium. Risk premium is defined as “the expected return on an investment that exceeds the risk-free rate of return”. The bigger the risk, the more risk premium investors need.”. Riskier investments do not necessarily provide a higher rate of return than risk-free ones. This is precisely why they are hazardous. However, historical evidence suggests that the only way for investors to obtain a better rate of return is to take on greater risk.

Systematic risk

Systematic risk is a type of risk at the macroeconomic level—risk that impacts a large number of assets to varying degrees. Inflation, interest rates, unemployment rates, currency exchange rates, and Gross National Product levels are all instances of systematic risk variables. These economic conditions have a significant influence on practically all securities. As a result, systemic risk cannot be completely eradicated.

Unsystematic risk

Unsystematic risk (or specific risk), on the other hand, is a type of risk that occurs at the micro-level risk factors that influence only a single asset or a small group of assets. It entails a distinct risk that is unrelated to other hazards and affects only particular securities or assets. For instance, Netflix’s poorly accepted adjustment to its planned consumer pricing structure elicited an extraordinarily unfavorable consumer response and defections, resulting in decreased earnings and stock prices. However, it had little effect on the Dow Jones or S&P 500 indexes, or on firms in the entertainment and media industries in general—with the probable exception of Netflix’s largest rival Blockbuster Video, whose value grew dramatically as a result of Netflix’s declining market share. Additional instances of unsystematic risk include a firm’s credit rating, poor newspaper coverage of a corporation, or a strike impacting a specific company. Diversification of assets within a portfolio can greatly minimize unsystematic risk.

Because the returns on various assets are, in fact, connected to some extent, unsystematic risk can never be totally avoided regardless of the number of asset classes pooled in a portfolio. The Markowitz Efficient Frontier is depicted in Figure 1, with all efficient portfolios on the upper line. The efficient frontier is a set of optimal portfolios that offer the best-projected return for a specified level of risk, or the lowest risk for a specified level of return. Portfolios that fall below the efficient frontier are inefficient because they do not generate a sufficient rate of return in relation to the level of risk (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Markowitz Efficient Frontier.
MEF_MPT
Source: computations by the author.

Risk-return trade-off

The term risk-return trade-off refers to Markowitz’s fundamental theory that the riskier an investment, the larger the necessary potential return (or expected return). Investors will generally retain a hazardous investment only if the predicted return is sufficiently high to compensate them for taking the risk. Markowitz derives a relation between expected return (μ) and variance (σ2p) captured in the following expression. Refer to the post Implementation of the Markowitz allocation model for a better understanding of the mathematical foundations of this approach:

img_SimTrade_variance_Markowitz_portfolio

where

  • A, B and C = Optimization parameters
  • μ = expected return vector

Diversification

The words ‘diversification’ and ‘Diversification Effect’ relate to the correlations between portfolio risk and diversification. Diversification, a tenet of Markowitz’s portfolio selection theory and MPT, is a risk-reduction strategy that entails allocating assets among a variety of financial instruments, sectors, and other asset classes. In more straightforward terms, it refers to the aphorism “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” If the basket is dropped, all eggs are shattered; if many baskets are used, the likelihood of all eggs being destroyed is significantly decreased. Diversification may be accomplished by investments in a variety of companies, asset types (e.g., bonds, real estate, etc.), and/or commodities such as gold or oil.

Diversification seeks to enhance returns while minimizing risk by investing in a variety of assets that will react differently to the same event (s). For example, whenever there is unfavorable news about the European debt crisis, the stock market typically declines dramatically. Simultaneously, the same news has generally benefited the price of specific commodities, such as gold. As a result, portfolio diversification methods should include not just diverse stocks inside and outside of the same industry, but also diverse asset classes, such as bonds and commodities. The Diversification Effect is a term that relates to the link between portfolio correlations and diversification. When there is an imperfect connection between assets (positive or negative), the diversification effect occurs. It is a critical and successful risk mitigation method since risk mitigation may be accomplished without jeopardizing profits. As a result, any prudent investor who is ‘risk cautious’ will diversify to a certain extent.

Limitation of the model

Despite its monumental theoretical significance, MPT has a slew of opponents who contend that its underlying assumptions and modeling of financial markets are frequently out of step with reality. One could argue that none of them are totally accurate and that each of them undermines MPT to varied degrees. Generally, some of the most common complaints include the following: irrationality of investors, relation between risk and return, treatment of information by investors, limitless borrowing capacity, perfectly efficient markets, and no taxes or transaction costs.

Irrationality of investors

It is assumed that investors are rational and aim to maximize returns while reducing risk. This is contrary to what market participants who become swept up in ‘herd behavior’ investment activity observe. For example, investors frequently gravitate into ‘hot’ industries, and markets frequently boom or burst because of speculative excesses.

Relation between risk and expected return

Increased risk = Increased expected returns. The idea that investors will only take more risk in exchange for higher predicted profits is regularly refuted by investor behavior. Frequently, investing techniques need investors to make a perceived hazardous investment (e.g., derivatives or futures) in order to lower total risk without increasing projected profits significantly. Additionally, investors may have certain utility functions that override worries about return distribution.

Treatment of information by investors

MPT anticipates that investors will get all information pertinent to their investment in a timely and thorough manner. In fact, global markets are characterized by information asymmetry (one party possesses superior knowledge), insider trading, and investors who are just more knowledgeable than others. This may explain why stocks, commercial assets, and enterprises are frequently acquired at a discount to their book or market value.

Limitless Borrowing Capacity

Another critical assumption mentioned previously is that investors have nearly unlimited borrowing capacity at a risk-free rate. Each investor has credit constraints in real-world markets. Additionally, only the federal government may borrow at the zero-interest treasury bill rate on a continuous basis.

Perfectly efficient markets

Markowitz’s theoretical contributions to MPT are predicated on the premise that markets are perfectly efficient (Markowitz, 1952). On the other hand, because MPT is based on asset values, it is susceptible to market whims such as environmental, personal, strategic, or social investment choice factors. Additionally, it ignores possible market failures like as externalities (costs or benefits that are not reflected in pricing), information asymmetry, and public goods (a non-rivalrous and non-excludable item). From another vantage point, centuries of ‘rushes’, ‘booms’, ‘busts’, ‘bubbles’, and ‘market crises’ illustrate that markets are far from efficient.

No Taxes or Transaction Costs

Neither taxes nor transaction costs are included in Markowitz’ theoretical contributions to MPT. To the contrary, genuine investment products are subject to both taxes and transaction costs (e.g., broker fees, administrative charges, and so on), and considering these costs into portfolio selection may certainly affect the optimal portfolio composition.

Conclusion

MPT has become the de facto dogma of contemporary financial theory and practice. The idea of MPT is that beating the market is tough, and those that do do it by diversifying their portfolios properly and taking above-average investing risks. The critical point to remember is that the model is only a tool—albeit the most powerful hammer in one’s financial toolbox. It has been over sixty years since Markowitz introduced MPT, and its popularity is unlikely to decrease anytime soon. His theoretical insights have served as the foundation for more theoretical investigation in the field of portfolio theory. Nonetheless, Markowitz’s portfolio theory is susceptible to and dependent on ongoing ‘probabilistic’ development and expansion.

Why should I be interested in this post?

Modern Portfolio Theory is at the heart of modern finance and its core foundations are structuring the modern investing panorama. MPT has established itself as the foundation for modern financial theory and practice. MPT’s premise is that beating the market is difficult, and those that do it by diversifying their portfolios appropriately and accepting higher-than-average investment risks.

MPT has been around for almost sixty years, and its popularity is unlikely to wane anytime soon. His theoretical contributions have laid the groundwork for more theoretical research in the field of portfolio theory. Markowitz’s portfolio theory, however, is vulnerable to and dependent on continuing ‘probabilistic’ development and expansion.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

Portfolio Theory

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Implementation of the Markowitz allocation model

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Implementation of the Black-Litterman model

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Black-Litterman model

Factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Factor Investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Is smart beta really smart?

Factors

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Quality Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Growth Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility Factor

Useful resources

Academic research

Ang, A., 2013. Factor Investing. Working paper.

Mangram, M.E., 2013. A simplified perspective of the Markowitz Portfolio Theory. Global Journal of Business Research, 7(1): 59-70.

Markowitz, H., 1952. Portfolio Selection. The Journal of Finance, 7(1): 77-91.

Mossin, J. 1966. Equilibrium in a Capital Asset Market. Econometrica, 34(4): 768-783.

Sharpe, W.F. 1963. A Simplified Model for Portfolio Analysis. Management Science, 9(2): 277-293.

Sharpe, W.F. 1964. Capital Asset Prices: A Theory of Market Equilibrium under Conditions of Risk. The Journal of Finance, 19(3): 425-442.

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

Smart Beta strategies: between active and passive allocation

Smart Beta strategies: between active and passive allocation

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) discusses the topic of smart beta strategies and especially the debate about its position as an active or passive allocation.

Smart beta strategies appear to be in the middle of the polarized asset management industry, which is segmented between active investing based on beating the performance of a given benchmark, and passive investing based on replicating a given benchmark.

This article is structured as follows: we begin by introducing the topic of smart beta strategies. We then discuss the different investing approach and their characteristic. A simple simulation exercise is then presented to understand how an alternative to market-capitalization-weightings indexes leads to different results. We wrap up with a general conclusion of the topic.

Introduction

Smart beta strategies are often found somewhere in the middle between active and passive investment management. In this post, we look at how investors think about this characteristic of smart beta investment strategies.

Passive funds aim at replicating or tracking an index (such as the S&P500 index in the US or the CAC40 index in France for equity markets) use a buy-and-hold strategy to achieve their goal of mimicking the performance of the market index. The beta of a passive fund is very close to the beta of the market index (benchmark).

Active funds are supervised by a portfolio manager that screens the best investments for the fund and time the market to profit from an upside potential. The excess return over the performance of the market index (benchmark) is referred to as alpha.

Smart beta funds are justified by the fact that capitalization-weighted strategies appear to be inefficient. They are based on transparent and rule-based strategies. Investors seek to obtain additional factor betas to enhance their portfolio performance.

While passive investing aims to match the market return, and active strategies rely on the fund manager’s ability to outperform the market, smart beta can be seen as a hybrid of the two approaches, with a passive component in the sense that it tracks one or more factors that are transparent and rule-based, and an active component in which the portfolio is managed, that is to say, rebalanced from time to time. Table 1 describes the main types of funds (passive, active and smart beta) and their respective strategies according to the investment approach and asset allocation methodology, and performance metrics. We also indicate the Greek letter that each strategy.

Table 1. Description of the main types of funds and their respective strategies.
main types of funds and their respective strategies
Source: table done by the author.

The passive investing approach

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) asserts that markets are efficient. The passive investing strategy is built on the concept of “buy-and-hold,” or keeping an investment position for a lengthy period without worrying about market timing or acting on the bought position. This latter technique is frequently implemented through the purchase of exchange-traded funds (ETF) that aim to closely match a given benchmark to produce a performance that is comparable to the underlying index or benchmark. The index might be broad-based, such as the S&P500 index in the US equity market for instance, or more specialized, such as an index that monitors a specific sector or geographical zone.

The active investing approach

Active management is an approach for going beyond matching a benchmark’s performance and instead aiming to outperform it. The alpha may be calculated using the same CAPM model framework, by linking the expected return with the fund manager’s extra return on the portfolio’s overall performance (Jensen, 1968). The search for alpha is done through two very different types of investment approaches: stock picking and market timing.

Stock picking

Stock picking is a method used by active managers to select assets based on a variety of variables such as their intrinsic value, the growth rate of dividends, and so on. Active managers use the fundamental analysis approach, which is based on the dissection of economic and financial data that may impact the asset price in the market.

Market timing

Market timing is a trading approach that involves entering and exiting the market at the right time. In other words, when rising outlooks are expected, investors will enter the market, and when downward outlooks are expected, investors will exit. For instance, technical analysis, which examines price and volume of transactions over time to forecast short-term future evolution, and fundamental analysis, which examines the macroeconomic and microeconomic data to forecast future asset prices, are the two techniques on which active managers base their decisions.

Review of academic literature

Passive investing

We can retrace the foundations of passive investing to the theory of portfolio construction developed by Harry Markowitz. For his theoretical implications, Markowitz’s work is widely regarded as a pioneer in financial economics and corporate finance. For his contributions to these disciplines, which he developed in his thesis “Portfolio Selection” published in The Journal of Finance in 1952. Markowitz received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1990. His groundbreaking work set the foundation for what is now known as ‘Modern Portfolio Theory’ (MPT).

William Sharpe, John Lintner, and Jan Mossin separately developed The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) as a result of Markowitz past research. The CAPM was a huge evolutionary step forward in capital market equilibrium theory because it enabled investors to appropriately value assets in terms of systematic risk. The portfolio management industry intended to capture the market portfolio return in the late 1970s, defined as a hypothetical collection of investments that contains every kind of asset available in the investment universe, with each asset weighted in proportion to its overall market participation. A market portfolio’s expected return is the same as the market’s overall expected return. But as financial research evolved and some substantial contributions were made, new factor characteristics emerged to capture some additional performance.

Active investing

As fund managers tried strategies to beat the market, financial literature delved deeper into the mechanism to achieve this purpose. Jensen’s groundbreaking work in the early ’70s gave rise to the concept of alpha in the tracking of a fund’s performance to distinguish between the fund’s manager’s ability to generate abnormal returns and the part of the returns due to luck (Jensen, 1968).

Smart beta / factor investing

Smart beta is defined as strategies that aim to address the inefficiencies of market capitalization weight indexation. In the early 2000s, as a result of numerous financial publications delving deeper into various elements that gave additional returns to increase the overall performance of the portfolio (the “Fama-French” papers), smart beta strategies evolved. Fund managers develop investment strategies based on researched factors that provide a time-tested abnormal return in exchange for taking on risk.

Understanding portfolio returns is crucial to determining how to evaluate portfolio performance. It all stems from Harry Markowitz’s groundbreaking work and pioneering research on portfolio construction and the impact of diversification in improving portfolio performance. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, investors made no distinction between the sources of portfolio returns. Finance research in the 1980s boosted the popularity of passive investment as an alternate basis for implementation. Investors began to successfully capture market beta through passive strategies. In the 2000s, investors began to see factors as major determinants of long-term return (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Overview of the evolution of performance metrics.
Overview of the evolution of performance metrics
Source: MSCI Factor Research (2021).

Grossman and Stiglitz’s research addressed the limitations of passive investment (1980). If the fund manager actively selects assets for his portfolio rather than passively replicating the benchmark, he may get higher abnormal returns. The term “abnormal returns” refers to the disparity between the actual and projected returns. In the financial literature, this “extra return” is referred to as alpha. It is one of the most tracked performance indicators by fund managers. Grossman and Stiglitz establish that there is no such thing as a successful passive investment. Indeed, they said that the benchmark is composed of assets chosen based on certain criteria (capitalization, return, liquidity, and the weight of each asset in the sector), and that “passive investing” is the most cost-effective alternative to active investing.

As pointed out by Jensen (1968), when assembling a portfolio, there are two points to bear in mind. The first point is the fund manager’s ability to foresee the asset’s price movement, and the second point is the fund manager’s capacity to limit investment risk via diversification.

Case study: Comparison of market-capitalization-weighted portfolios and equally-weighted portfolios

The difference between two investment strategies can be evaluated by comparing the weights of the assets of their associated portfolio. Note that over time the weights can evolve with voluntary sales and purchases of the assets. Such divestments and investments refer to the rebalancing of the portfolio.

Buy-and-hold investing is a passive investment strategy in which an investor buys assets and holds them for a long period, independent of market fluctuations. A buy-and-hold investor selects companies but is indifferent to short-term market swings or technical indicators. The buy-and-hold investment strategy corresponds to market-capitalization-weighted portfolios.

The buy-and-hold approach is recommended by several prominent investors, like Warren Buffett, to individuals seeking profitable long-term returns. Buy-and-hold investors outperform active management on average over longer time horizons and after costs. Buy-and-hold investors, on the other hand, may not sell at the greatest price available, according to proponents.

Excel file for market-capitalization-weighted and equally-weighted portfolios

You can download an Excel file with data used for this exercise.

Download the Excel file to compute Exercise Market Cap Equally Weighted Portfolios

The goal of this exercise is to compare the performance of the two types of investments and to balance the two approaches to obtain a better understanding of each strategy and its market behavior. To be able to homogeneously analyze the underlying assets of the buy and hold strategy as well as the smart beta approach, three stocks have been simulated.

All the price data, number of shares, stock returns, and market-capitalization are all simulated for a more simplistic model. The buy and hold strategy is based on an evenly weighted portfolio. Only the small-cap stock (Stock 1) will have prices fluctuations to analyze the size effect as a driver of returns in a portfolio. A rebalancing exercise is implemented for the smart beta portfolio, no trading nor any related cost for implementing the strategy is applied and thus, don’t reflect the full picture as in financial markets.

Table 2 is made of three components. The first section of the table represents our data for the simulation. Each stock has a different size representing respectively a small, mid, and large-capitalization firm. Market capitalization is obtained through a simple computation by multiplying the number of shares times the price of each share. The second section of the table is the simulation of a market-capitalization-weighted portfolio. The third section represents a smart beta portfolio that uses an equally-weighted weighting indexing (Table 2). Note that with the market-capitalization-weighted portfolio there is a concentration in the stock with the largest market capitalization (due to its high past performance). An equally-weighted portfolio obtained with rebalancing (often associated with smart beta strategies such as growth) would not present such property and show a more diversified portfolio over time. Note that the frequency of rebalancing the portfolio can affect the risk/performance characteristics. Amenc et. al. (2016) show that the Sharpe ratio tends to decrease with a higher frequency for rebalancing.

Table 2. Simulation of a market-capitalization-weighted portfolio and an equally-weighted portfolio.
Smart_beta_simulation_spreadsheet
Source: simulations and calculations by the author.

The simulation unveiled that the market-capitalization-weighted portfolio’s size anomaly failed to capture the outperformance of small-cap stocks, resulting in results that were lower than those of the smart beta equally weighted portfolio, which had a good exposure to small caps (Figure 2). The key point of this simulated model is that the market-cap indexation has a defect related to the concentration of large companies in the profile of small caps which represent a small percentage of the index. The size factor is based on a risk factor that aims to capture the documented outperformance of small-cap firms compared to larger enterprises. With this simulated model, we have proven with a very simple model in the conception that the size anomaly can indeed be a vector of return, as researched in the paper of Banz (1981) which precisely describes this concept on the US equity market (Figure 2).

Figure 2. market-capitalization-weighted portfolio vs equally-weighted portfolio.
Market_cap_eq
Source: simulations and calculations by the author.

One aspect to consider in this case analysis is that one of the possible explanations for this outperformance is that the weights are changed at rebalancing dates rather than allowed to drift with the price fluctuations, which is a clear distinction between cap-weighted indexes and smart beta strategies. Some claim that this rebalancing completely explains the success of smart beta strategies (Amenc et al, 2016). This allegation, however, does not hold up under investigation. An examination of buy-and-hold portfolios vs portfolios rebalanced at various frequencies reveals that whether or not rebalancing improves performance is dependent on the return behavior of the assets in the portfolio. Rebalancing may or may not provide better results than buy-and-hold tactics (Amenc et. al., 2016).

Even if beneficial rebalancing impacts occur, Smart Beta methods may not be able to capture them. Contrary to popular belief, data shows that rebalancing an equal-weighted approach more frequently does not always increase performance. Furthermore, both short- and long-term reversal effects are empirically insignificant in explaining the performance of a wide variety of Smart Beta strategies. Naturally, rebalancing is necessary, especially to maintain diversity and target factor exposures. Rebalancing, on the other hand, is not an experimentally verified source of Smart Beta strategy performance (Amenc et. al., 2016).

Smart beta: passive or active investment strategy?

Smart beta investing is considered a hybrid strategy because it attempts to replicate the performance of a predetermined benchmark without engaging in market timing or stock picking, and an active strategy because investors choose to gain exposure to specific factors (beyond the market factor) by rebalancing the portfolio according to some rules. In practice, smart beta strategies often imply rebalancing to maintain target weights for each factor. In this sense, smart beta strategies are active, or at least more active than the buy-and-hold strategy. However, the rebalancing of portfolios of smart beta strategies is usually done with a predefined rule. In this sense, smart beta strategies are passive, or at least more passive than discretionary investment strategies based on stock picking and market timing.

Why should I be interested in this post?

If you are a business school or university undergraduate or graduate student, this content will help you in understanding the various evolutions of asset management throughout the last decades and in broadening your knowledge of finance beyond the classical 101 course.

Smart beta funds have become a hot issue among investors in recent years. Smart beta is a game-changing invention (or just a new marketing idea?) that addresses an unmet need among investors: a higher return for lower risk, net of transaction and administrative costs. In a way, these tactics create a new market. As a result, smart beta is gaining traction and influencing the asset management market.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Factor Investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Origin of Factor Investing

Factor series

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Quality Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Growth Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility Factor

Useful resources

Academic research

Amenc, N., Ducoulombier, F., Goltz, F. and Ulahel, J., 2016. Ten misconceptions about smart beta. EDHEC Risk Institute Working paper.

Banz, R.W., 1981. The relationship between return and market value of common stocks. Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 9, pp. 3-18.

Fama, E.F., French, K.R., 1992. The cross-section of expected stock returns. The Journal of Finance, 47: 427-465.

Grossman, S., Stiglitz, J., 1980. On the impossibility of Informationally efficient markets. The American Economic Review, 70(3), 393-408.

Jensen, M.C. 1968. The performance of mutual funds from 1945–1964. The Journal of Finance, 23:389-416.

Malkiel, B., 1995. Returns from Investing in Equity Mutual Funds 1971 to 1991. The Journal of Finance, 50(2):549-572.

Business analysis

BlackRock Research, 2021. What is Factor Investing?

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

Hedging strategies – Equities

Hedging Strategies – Equities

Akshit Gupta

This article written by Akshit GUPTA (ESSEC Business School, Master in Management, 2019-2022) presents the different hedging strategies based on option contracts.

Introduction

Hedging is a risk mitigation strategy used by investors reduce the risk in an existing investment. In financial markets, hedging is used as an effective tool by investors to minimize the risk exposure and maximize the returns for any investment in securities. Equity options are commonly used by investors / traders as hedging mechanisms due to their great flexibility (in terms of expiration date, moneyness, liquidity, etc.) and availability. Hedging does not eliminate the entire risk for any investment but often limits the potential losses that the investor can incur. Positions in equity options are used to offset the risk exposure in the underlying equity, another option contract or in any other derivative contract.

Different strategies used in hedging

There are many ways to hedge the exposure in any given security. Some of the most used hedging strategies for an exposure in equity includes the following:

Writing a covered call

A call option gives the buyer of the option, the right but not the obligation, to buy a security at a fixed date and price defined in the contract. In a covered call, the investor writes (sells) a call option on the stock he holds in his portfolio. He earns the premium by writing the call option. Investors execute this strategy when they are bullish about the stock. The maximum payoff potential from this strategy is limited but the potential downside/losses is can be quite high (although limited).

Covered call

Buying a protective put

A put option gives the buyer of the option, the right but not the obligation, to sell a security at a fixed date and price defined in the contract. In a protective put, the investor buys a put option on the stock she holds in her portfolio. She pays the premium by buying the put option. Investors execute this strategy when they are bearish about the stock. The maximum payoff potential from this strategy is unlimited but the potential downside/losses is limited.

Protective Put

Spreads

Spreads are option hedging strategies where the investor/trader will take positions in multiple options of the same type (either call options or put options on the same underlying). The different types of spreads are mentioned below:

Strangle and Straddle

In a strangle, the investor buys a European call and a European put option, both at the same expiration date but different strike prices. To benefit from this strategy, the price of the underlying asset must move further away from the central value in either direction i.e., increase or decrease. If the stock prices stay at a level closer to the central value, the investor will incur losses. This strategy is suitable for investors who expect a huge price movement but are unsure of the direction of the movement.

Strangle

In a straddle, the investor buys a European call and a European put option, both at the same expiration date and at the same strike price. This strategy works in a similar manner like a strangle. However, the potential losses are a bit higher than incurred in a strangle if the stock price remains near the central value at expiration date.

Straddle

Bull and Bear spreads

In a bull spread, the investor buys a European call option on a stock with strike price K1 and sells a call option on the same stock at strike price K2 (which is higher than K1) at the same expiration date. The investor forecasts the prices to go up and is bullish about the stock. The spread limits the potential downside risk on buying the call option, but also limits the potential profit by capping the upside. It Is used as an effective hedge to limit the losses.

Bull spread

In a bear spread, the investor expects the prices of the stock to decline. In order to hedge against the downside, the investor buys a put option at strike price K2 and sells a put option at strike price K1, where K1 < K2. Initially, this strategy leads to a cash outflow since the put option is sold at a lower strike price, which results in lower premium.

Bear spread

Useful Resources

Hull J.C. (2015) Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives, Ninth Edition, Chapter 10 – Trading strategies involving Options, 276-295.

Investopedia Using Options as a Hedging Strategy

Related Posts

   ▶ Gupta A. Option Greeks – Delta

   ▶ Gupta A. History of Options markets

   ▶ Gupta A. Option Trader – Job description

   ▶ Gupta A. Options

About the author

Article written in September 2021 by Akshit GUPTA (ESSEC Business School, Master in Management, 2019-2022).

Types of exercise for option contracts

Types of exercise for option contracts

Akshit Gupta

This article written by Akshit GUPTA (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022) presents the different types of exercise for option contracts.

Introduction

Exercising a call option contract means the purchase of the underlying asset by the call buyer at the price set in the option contract (strike price). Similarly, exercising a put option contract means the sale of the underlying asset by the put buyer at the price set in the option contract.

The different option contracts can be settled in cash or with a physical delivery of the underlying asset. Normally, the equity, fixed interest security and commodity option contracts are settled using physical delivery and index options are settled in cash.

Majority of options are not exercised before the maturity date because it is not optimal for the option holder to do so. Note that for options with physical delivery, it may be better to close the position before the expiration date). If an option expires unexercised, the option holder loses any of the rights granted in the contract (indeed, in-the-money options are automatically exercised at maturity). Exercising options is a sophisticated and at times a complicated process and option holder need to take several factors into consideration while making the decision about exercise such as opinion about future market behavior of underlying asset in option, tax implications of exercise, net profit that will be acquired after deducting exercise commissions, option type, vested shares, etc.

Different types of exercise for option contracts

The option style does not deal with the geographical location of where they are traded! The contracts differ in terms of their expiration time when they can be exercised. The option contracts can be categorized as per different styles they come in. Some of the most common styles of option contracts are:

American options

American-style options give the option buyer the right to exercise his/her option anytime prior or up to the expiration date of the contract. These options provide greater flexibility to the option buyer but also come at a higher price as compared to the European-style options.

European options

European-style options can only be exercised on the expiration or maturity date of the contract. Thus, they offer less flexibility to the option buyer. However, the European options are cheaper as compared to the American options.

Bermuda options

Bermuda options are a mix of both American and European style options. These options can only be exercised on specific predetermined dates or periods up to the expiration date. They are considered to be exotic option contracts and provide limited flexibility to the option buyer.

Early Exercise

Early exercise is a strategy of exercising options before the expiration date and is possible with American options only. The question is: when the holder of an American option should exercise his/her option? Before the expiration date or at the expiration date? Quantitative models say that it could be optimal to exercise American options before the date of a dividend payout (options are not protected against the payement of dividends by firms) and sometimes for deep in-the-money put options.

There are many strategies that investors follow while exercising option contracts in order to maximize their gains and hedge risks. A few of them are discussed below:

Exercise-and-Hold

Investors can purchase their option shares with cash and hold onto them. This allows them to benefit from ownership in company stock, providing potential gains from any increase in stock value and dividend payments if any. Investors are also liable to pay brokerage commissions fees and taxes.

Exercise-and-Sell

This is a cashless strategy wherein investors purchase the option shares and then immediately sell them. Brokerages generally allow this kind of transaction without use of cash, with the money from the stock sale covering the purchase price, as well as the commissions and taxes associated with the transaction. This choice provides investors with available cash in pocket to invest elsewhere too.

Exercise-and-Sell-to-Cover

In this strategy too, investors exercise the option and then immediately sell enough shares to cover the purchase price, commissions fees and taxes. The remaining shares remain with the investor.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

   ▶ All posts about Options

   ▶ Akshit GUPTA Options

   ▶ Akshit GUPTA Analysis of the Rogue Trader movie

   ▶ Akshit GUPTA History of Options markets

   ▶ Akshit GUPTA Option Trader – Job description

Useful Resources

Academic research

Hull J.C. (2015) Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives, Ninth Edition, Chapter 10 – Mechanics of options markets, 235-240.

Business analysis

Fidelity Exercising Stock Options

About the author

Article written in August 2021 by Akshit GUPTA (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022).

VIX index

VIX index

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents the VIX index, which is a financial index that measures the uncertainty in the US equity market.

This article is structured as follows: we begin by defining the grounding notions of the VIX index. We then explain the behavior of this index and its statistical characteristics. We finish by presenting its practical usage in financial markets.

Definition

The CBOE Volatility Index, abbreviated “VIX”, is a measure of the expected S&P 500 index movement calculated by the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) from the current trading prices of options written on the S&P 500 index.

Known as Wall Street’s “fear index”, the VIX is closely monitored by a broad range of market players, and its level and pattern have become ingrained in market discussion.

Figure 1 illustrates the evolution of the VIX index for the period from 2003 to 2021.
Figure 1 Historical levels of the VIX index from 2003-2021.
VIX_levels_analysis
Source: computation by the author (Data source: Thomson Reuters).

VIX values greater than 20 are regarded to be high by market participants. If the VIX is between 12 and 20, it is considered normal; if it is less than 12, it is considered low. As it is the case with other indices, the VIX is computed using the price of a basket of tradable components (in this case, options expiring within the next month or so). The profit or loss that option buyers and sellers realize during the option’s life will depend, among other things, on how significantly the S&P 500’s actual volatility will differ from the implied volatility given by the VIX at the start of the period (S&P Global Research, 2017).

Behavior of the VIX index

Statistical distribution of the S&P500 index returns and VIX level

Figure 2 displays the statistical distribution of the price variations in the S&P500 index for different levels of the VIX index The higher the VIX index (by convention, greater than 20), the more severe the distribution tends to be, with negative skewness and high kurtosis indicating heightened volatility in the US market, therefore exacerbating both positive and negative swings. An opposite finding may be made for the VIX level at lower levels (often less than 12), when market swings are less evident due to less skewness and lower kurtosis (S&P Global Research, 2017).

Figure 2. The distribution of 30-day return in the S&P500 index for different VIX index levels.
Statistical distribution of the S&P500 index returns
Source: S&P Global Research (2017).

If the VIX is low, market players may benefit by purchasing options; conversely, if the VIX is high, market participants may profit from selling options. The specific utility of anticipated VIX is that it gives us with a more accurate assessment of whether VIX is high, low, or normal at any point in time (S&P Global Research, 2017). Thus, VIX may be regarded of as a crowd-sourced estimate of the S&P 500’s expected volatility. As with interest rates and dividends, one cannot invest directly in them, even though one can guess on their future worth, one cannot invest directly in VIX, and the significance of a specific VIX level is commonly misinterpreted (S&P Global Research, 2017).

Recent volatility in the S&P500 index and VIX level

Figure 3 demonstrates that the VIX index is strongly correlated with recent market volatility. However, there is considerable variance; for example, a recent volatility level of about 20% has been associated with a VIX level of 34 (point B, when VIX was very “high”) and with a VIX level of 12 (point C, when VIX was relatively “low”). Volatility (realized or implied) has a strong propensity to return to its mean. This insight is not especially original, despite its illustrious past. There is an enormous body of data demonstrating that volatility tends to mean revert across markets, and the pioneers of this field were given the Nobel Prize in part for incorporating their results into volatility forecasts and simulations (S&P Global Research, 2017).

Figure 3. Relation between VIX and recent volatility.
VIX_regression_analysis
Source: S&P Global Research (2017).

Realized volatility in the S&P500 index and VIX level

Figure 4 represents the relationship between Realized volatility in the S&P500 index over a period and the VIX level at the begining of the period.

Figure 4. VIX versus next realized volatility.
VIX_realized_graph
Source: S&P Global Research (2017).

Mean reversion

Figure 5 shows how VIX index converge to a certain llong-term level as time passes. This finding is not due to 15% being exceptional in any manner; this figure for M was calculated using historical volatility levels for the S&P 500 and their evolution. It is not implausible that M (else referred to as long-term average volatility in the US equities market) may change over time; changes in the S&P 500’s sector weightings, trade All of these factors have the ability to influence both the pace and the volume and the point at which mean reversion occurs.

Figure 5. Mean-reversion dynamic in recent volatility.
VIX mean reversion
Source: S&P Global Research (2017).

Use of the VIX index in financial markets

There are two methods for determining an asset’s volatility. Either through a statistical calculation of an asset’s realized volatility, also known as historical volatility, which serves as a pointer to the asset’s volatility behavior. This is a limited method that is based on the premise that past volatility tends to replicate itself in the future, without including a forward-looking study of volatility. The second technique is to extract an asset’s volatility from option prices referred to as “implied volatility”.

Why should I be interested in this post?

When investors make investment decisions, they utilize the VIX to gauge the degree of risk, worry, or stress in the market. Additionally, traders can trade the VIX using a range of options and exchange-traded products, or price derivatives using VIX values.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

   ▶ All posts about Options

   ▶ Akshit GUPTA Options

   ▶ Akshit GUPTA History of Option Markets

   ▶ Jayati WALIA Implied Volatility

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility Factor

Useful resources

Business analysis

CBOE , 2021. VIX

Nasdaq, 2021. Realized Volatility

Nasdaq, 2021. Vix Index Volatility

S&P Global Research, 2017. Reading VIX: Does VIX Predict Future Volatility?

S&P Global Research, 2017. A Practitioner’s Guide to Reading VIX

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

Factor Investing

Factor Investing

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents factor investing, which is an investment approach that focuses on distinct performance drivers across asset classes.

This article is structured as follows: we begin with the early works of factor investing (market factor). We then delve more in detail on the different factors available and their characteristics. We finish with an empirical analysis that aims to capture the performance of factor investing across time.

Early works

In the world of investing, a factor is a persistent driver that helps explain assets’ long-term risk and return properties across asset classes. It is important to understand how factors work to better capture their potential for excess return and reduced risk across asset classes.

As a result of Harry Markowitz’s prior studies, William Sharpe, John Lintner, and Jan Mossin independently developed the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The CAPM was a significant evolutionary step forward in capital market equilibrium theory because it allowed investors to value assets correctly in terms of systematic risk that impact all assets (Mangram, 2013). In the CAPM, the factor is the market factor representing the global uncertainty of the market.

In the late 1970s, the portfolio management industry aimed to capture the market portfolio return, but as financial research advanced and certain significant contributions were made, this gave rise to other factor characteristics to capture some additional performance.

Factor investing

As defined by Blackrock (2021), “Factor investing” is an investment strategy that focuses on unique determinants of performance across asset classes. Factor investing may improve portfolio performance and decrease volatility by increasing portfolio diversification. Asset returns are driven by two main types of factors: macroeconomic factors and style factors. Macroeconomic factors capture broad risks across asset classes while style factors explain returns and risk within asset classes.

Considering macroeconomic factors, returns can be influenced by the following macroeconomic variables (BlackRock research, 2021):

  • Economic growth: exposure to business and market cycles
  • Real interest rates: sensitivity to interest rate movements
  • Inflation: exposure to change in price
  • Credit: default risk from lending to companies
  • Emerging markets: political and sovereign risk
  • Liquidity: holding liquid assets.

Considering style factors, returns can be influenced by the following style variables (BlackRock research, 2021):

  • Value: stocks discounted to relative value
  • Minimum volatility: stable, lower risk stocks
  • Momentum: stocks with upward price trends
  • Quality: financially healthy companies
  • Size: smaller, high growth companies
  • Growth: companies that have a rate of growth above the market growth
  • Yield: companies that have undervalued and stable dividends

Characteristics of a factor

As defined in the work of Ang (2013) a factor must comply with the following characteristics:

  • A factor must be backed up by scholarly research: factors should have an academic basis. The research should illustrate either compelling logical reasoning or compelling behavioral biases, or both, in order to adequately justify the risk premium (Ang, 2013). Value, momentum, and minimum volatility among other strategies qualify as adequate risk factors under this criterion. New research may find new factors, qualify prior agreement on recognized factors, or even reject factors previously identified, all of which may be used to shape investment strategy.
  • A factor must have maintained a substantial risk premium in the past and is anticipated to do so in the future: not only should investors understand why the risk premium existed in the past, but they should also have some reason to believe that it will continue to exist in the future (at least in the short run). By definition, factors are systematic–they emerge from risk or behavioral patterns that will likely continue (again, in the short run), even if everyone is aware of the factors and many investors pursue the same factor strategies (no crowding effect).
  • A factor must be capable of being implemented in liquid, tradable instruments: factor strategies should be very inexpensive, which is best done via the use of liquid securities.

Academic literature on factor investing

Numerous academic studies and years of investing experience have revealed some types of stock, debt, and derivative assets with larger payoffs than the broad market index. Over extended periods of time, equities with low price-to-book ratios (value stocks) outperform those with high price-to-book ratios (growth stocks), creating a value-growth premium (Ang, 2013). Over time, equities with a history of high or positive returns (winners) outperform those with a history of low or negative returns (losers). This is at the heart of momentum strategies, which seeks to get exposure to stocks that have a winning tendency in the upside and downside assuming that they will continue to do well in the short term (Ang, 2013).

Investors seeking downside protection in a turbulent market environment may increase exposure to low volatility strategies, while those comfortable with more risk may choose for higher-return strategies such as momentum. The financial literature has explored deeper to show that some factors have had a long-term impact on returns. These factors contributed to returns for three reasons: an investor’s desire to take on risk, structural obstacles, and the reality that not all investors are not always entirely rational (BlackRock research, 2021). Particular factors yield higher returns as a result of increased risk but may underperform in certain market conditions. Enhanced methods use factors in more sophisticated ways, such as trading across various asset classes and sometimes investing in both long and short positions. These improved factor strategies are used by investors seeking absolute returns or as a supplement to hedge funds and classic active strategies (BlackRock research, 2021).

Securities that are less liquid trade at a discount to their more liquid counterparts and earn a higher average excess return on average. As a result, a premium is charged for illiquidity (Ang, 2013). Bonds with a greater risk of default often have higher average returns, owing to the credit risk premium. Additionally, because investors are ready to pay for protection against periods of extreme volatility, when returns tend to fall, sellers of volatility protection in option markets receive a high rate of return on average (Ang, 2013). As a result, investors can collect the premiums as follows (Ang, 2013):

  • The value-growth premium is equal to the difference between value and growth stocks.
  • The momentum premium is equal to the difference between winning and losing stocks.
  • The illiquidity premium is equal to the difference between the value of illiquid assets and the value of liquid assets.
  • The credit risk premium is the difference between the return on risky and safe debt.

These are dynamic factors, since they reflect time-varying holdings in securities that fluctuate in value over time. While dynamic factors frequently outperform the market over extended periods of time, they can significantly underperform at select occasions — such as the 2008-2009 financial crisis. While dynamic factors frequently outperform the market over extended periods of time, they can outperform the market significantly at select moments — such as the 2008-2009 financial crisis. In the long term, factor risk premiums exist to compensate investors for experiencing losses during difficult times (Ang, 2013). In the end, the factors are not ideal for everyone due to the inherent risk associated with factor techniques.

Empirical analysis

Hodges et al. (2017) published a study in the Journal of Portfolio Management that looks at the performance of factor funds over a 30-year period and examines the vectors of returns). Figure 1 illustrates the average excess returns (above the MSCI USA Index) of each factor from June 30, 1988 to September 30, 2016. Value, quality, momentum, and size all have positive average returns; momentum and value have the largest annual excess returns of 3.4 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. Minimum volatility has generated an average return comparable to the market (but with less risk), similar with Ang’s findings (Hodges et al., 2017).

Figure 1. Factor analysis from 1988 – 2016. Average excess return.

Average_excess_return_Smart_Beta_JPM_AM
Source: Hodges et al. (2017).

Figure 2 plots 12-month moving averages of excess factor returns and demonstrates that, while long­run excess premiums are positive, there is significant temporal variation throughout the sample. For instance, size changes from a negative 12-month mean return of -2.0 percent in 1999 to a positive 12-month mean return of 3.0 percent in the early 2000s.

Figure 2. Smart beta excess returns for the period from 1988 to 2016.

Excess_return_Smart_Beta_JPM_AM
Source: Hodges et al. (2017).

Figure 3 demonstrates that the excess factor returns are not substantially correlated: the lowest correlation is -0.42, while the largest is 0.67, between minimal volatility and size. Notably, momentum and value are negatively connected with a correlation coefficient of -0.22, which is consistent with their well-known negative association (Hodges, et al., 2017).

Figure 3. Correlation analysis of smart beta excess returns for the period from 1988 to 2016.

Correlation_analysis_Smart_Beta_JPM_AM
Source: Hodges et al. (2017).

Why should I be interested in this post?

Numerous equity investors seeking greater returns at a cheaper cost have shifted their focus to factor investing. Active managers in the traditional sense typically make investing decisions based on their research of particular companies and their stocks. By contrast, factor strategies identify the qualities, or factors, that are most likely to beat the market and then invest in stocks that exhibit those characteristics. For instance, the value factor is based on the strategy of investing in companies that are undervalued in comparison to the market, whereas the momentum factor is based in the strategy of investing in equities that have recently seen a price acceleration.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Quality Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Growth Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility Factor

Useful resources

Academic research

Ang, A., 2013. Factor Investing. Working paper.

Hodges, P., Hogan, K., Peterson, J. R., Ang, A., 2017. Factor Timing with Cross- Sectional and Time-Series Predictors. The Journal of Portfolio Management 44(1): 30-43.

Business Analysis

BlackRock research, 2021. What is Factor Investing?

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

Origin of factor investing

Origin of factor investing

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents the origin of factor investing. A factor is defined as a persistent driver that helps explain assets’ long-term risk and return properties across asset classes.

This article is structured as follows: we begin by presenting Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) as the origin of factor investing (market factor). We then explain the Fama-French three-factor models, which is an extension of the CAPM single factor model (market factor). Furthermore, we explain also the Carhart four-factor model and the Fama-French five-factor model that aimed to capture additional factors to the market factor.

Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory: Origin of the factor investing

Factor investing can be retraced to the work of Harry Markowitz in the early 1950s. The most important aspect of Markowitz’s approach was his fundamental finding that an asset’s risk and return should not be evaluated on its own, but rather on how it contributes to the entire risk and return of a portfolio. His dissertation, titled “Portfolio Selection”, was published in The Journal of Finance (1952). Nearly thirty years later, Markowitz shared the Nobel Prize for economics and corporate finance for his MPT contributions to both disciplines. The holy grail of Markowitz’s work is based on his calculation of the variance of a two-asset portfolio computed as follows:

Markowitz_2_asset_MV

Where:

  • w and (1-w) represents asset weights of assets A and B
  • σ2 represents the variance of the assets and portfolio
  • cov(rA,rB) represents the covariance of assets A and B.

Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)

William Sharpe, John Lintner, and Jan Mossin separately developed another key capital markets theory as a result of Markowitz’s previous works : the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The CAPM was a huge evolutionary step forward in capital market equilibrium theory, since it enabled investors to appropriately value assets in terms of systematic risk, defined as the market risk which cannot be neutralized by the effect of diversification. In his derivation of the CAPM, Sharpe, Mossin and Litner made significant contributions to the concepts of the Efficient Frontier and Capital Market Line. Sharpe, Litner and Mossin seminal contributions would later earn him the Nobel Prize in Economics. The CAPM is based on a set of market structure and investor hypotheses:

  • There are no intermediaries
  • There are no limits (short selling is possible)
  • Supply and demand are in balance
  • There are no transaction costs
  • An investor’s portfolio value is maximized by maximizing the mean associated with projected returns while reducing risk variance
  • Investors have simultaneous access to information in order to implement their investment plans
  • Investors are seen as “rational” and “risk averse”.

Under this framework, the expected return of a given asset is related to its risk measured by the beta:

CAPM

Where :

  • E(r) represents the expected return of the asset
  • rf the risk-free rate
  • β a measure of the risk of the asset
  • E(rm) the expected return of the market
  • E[rm– rf]represents the market risk premium.

In this model, the beta (β) parameter is a key parameter and is defined as:

Beta

Where:

  • Cov(r, rm) represents the covariance of the asset with the market
  • σ2(rm) is the variance of market return.

The beta is a measure of how sensitive an asset is to market swings. This risk indicator aids investors in predicting the fluctuations of their asset in relation to the wider market. It compares the volatility of an asset to the systematic risk that exists in the market. The beta is a statistical term that denotes the slope of a line formed by a regression of data points comparing stock returns to market returns. It aids investors in understanding how the asset moves in relation to the market. According to Fama and French (2004), there are two ways to interpret the beta employed in the CAPM:

  • According to the CAPM formula, beta may be thought in mathematical terms as the slope of the regression between the asset return and the market return. Thus, beta quantifies the asset sensitivity to changes in the market return;
  • According to the beta formula, it may be understood as the risk that each dollar invested in an asset adds to the market portfolio. This is an economic explanation based on the observation that the market portfolio’s risk (measured by 〖σ(r_m)〗^2) is a weighted average of the covariance risks associated with the assets in the market portfolio, making beta a measure of the covariance risk associated with an asset in comparison to the variance of the market return.

Additionally, the CAPM makes a distinction between two forms of risk: systematic and specific risk. Systematic risk refers to the risk posed by the market’s basic structure, its participants, and any and all non-diversifiable elements such as monetary policy, political events, and natural disasters. By contrast, specific risk refers to the risk inherent in a particular asset and so is diversifiable. As a result, the CAPM solely captures systematic risk via the beta measure, with the market’s beta equal to one, lower-risk assets having a beta less than one, and higher-risk assets having a beta larger than one.

Finally, the CAPM’s central message is that when investors invest in a particular security/portfolio, they are rewarded twice: once via the time value of money impact (reflected in the risk-free component of the CAPM equation) and once via the effect of taking on more risk. However, the CAPM is not an empirically sound model, owing to an unnecessarily simplified set of assumptions and problems in establishing validating tests at the model’s first introduction (Fama and French, 2004). Thus, throughout time, the CAPM has been revised and modified to address not just its inadequacies but also to keep pace with financial and economic changes. Sharpe (1990), in his evaluation of the CAPM, cites various examples of revisions to his basic model proposed by other economists and financial experts.

The Fama-French three-factor model

Eugene Fama and Kenneth French created the Fama-French Three-Factor model in 1993 in response to the CAPM’s inadequacy. It contends that, in addition to the market risk component introduced by the CAPM, two more factors affect the returns on securities and portfolios: market capitalization (referred to as the “size” factor) and the book-to-market ratio (referred to as the “value” factor). According to Fama and French, the primary rationale for include these characteristics is because both size and book-to-market (BtM) ratios are related to the economic fundamentals of the business issuing the securities (Fama and French, 1993).

They continue by stating that:

  • Earnings and book-to-market ratios are inversely associated, with companies with low book-to-market ratios consistently reporting better earnings than those with high book-to-market ratios
  • Due to a similar risk component, size and average returns are inversely associated. This is based on their observation of the trajectory of small business profits in the 1980s: they suggest that small enterprises experience longer durations of earnings depression than larger enterprises in the event of a recession in the economy in which they operate. Additionally, they noted that smaller enterprises did not contribute to the economic expansion in the mid- and late-1980s following the 1982 recession
  • Profitability is connected to both size and BtM, and is a common risk factor that emphasizes and explains the positive association between BtM ratios and average returns. As thus, the return on a security/portfolio becomes:

FF_3FM

Where :

  • E(𝑟) is the expected return of the asset/portfolio
  • 𝑟𝑓 is the risk-free rate
  • 𝛽 is the measure of the market risk of the asset
  • 𝐸(𝑟𝑀) is the expected return of the market
  • 𝛽𝑆 is the measure of the risk related to the size of the asset
  • 𝛽𝑉 is the measure of the risk related to the value of the security/portfolio
  • 𝑆𝑀𝐵 (which stands for “Small Minus Big”) measures the difference in expected returns between small and big firms (in terms of market capitalization)
  • 𝐻𝑀𝐿 (which stands for “High Minus Low”) measures the difference in expected returns between value stocks and growth stock
  • 𝛼 is a regression intercept
  • 𝜖 is a measure of regression error

Both SMB and HML are derived using historical data as well as a mixture of portfolios focused on size and value. Professor French publishes these values on a regular basis on his personal website. Meanwhile, the betas for both the size and value components are derived using linear regression and might be positive or negative. However, the Fama-French three-factor model is not without flaws. Griffin (2002) highlights a significant flaw in the model when he claims that the Fama-French components of value and size are more accurate at explaining return differences when applied locally rather than internationally. As a result, each of the components should be addressed on a nation-by-country basis (as professor French now does on his website, where he specifies the SMB and HML factors for each nation, such as the United Kingdom, France, and so on). While the Fama-French model has gone further than the CAPM in terms of breaking down security returns, it remains an incomplete model with spatially confined interpretation of its additional variables. Efforts have been made over the years to complete this model, with Fama and French adding two more variables in 2015, profitability and investment strategy, and other scholars, like as Carhart (1997), adding a fourth feature, momentum, to the original Three-Factor model.

The Carhart four-factor model

Carhart (1997) extended the Fama-French three-factor model (1993) by adding a fourth factor: momentum. Momentum is defined as the observable tendency for prices to continue climbing or declining following an initial increase or decline. By definition, momentum is an anomaly, as the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) states that there is no reason for security prices to continue growing or declining after an initial change in their value.

While traditional financial theory is unable to define precisely what causes momentum in certain securities, behavioural finance provides some insight into why momentum exists; indeed, Chan, Jegadeesh and Lakonishok (1996) argue that momentum arises from the inability of the majority of investors to react quickly and immediately to new market information and, thus, integrate that information into securities. This argument demonstrates investors’ irrationality when it comes to appraising the value of certain stocks and making investing decisions. Carhart was motivated to incorporate the momentum component into the Fama-French three-factor model since the model was unable to account for return variance in momentum-sorted portfolios (Fama and French, 1996 – Carhart 1997). Carhart incorporated Jegadeesh and Titman’s (1993) one-year momentum variation into his model as a result.

Carhart_4FM

Where the additional component represents:

  • 𝛽𝑀 is the measure of the risk related to the momentum factor of the security/portfolio
  • 𝑈𝑀𝐷 (which stands for “Up Minus Down”) measures the difference in expected returns between “winning” securities and “losing” securities (in terms of momentum).

As Carhart states in his article, the four-factor model, like the CAPM and the Fama-French Three-Factor, may be used to explain the sources of return on a specific security/portfolio (Carhart, 1997).

The Fama-French five-factor model

Fama and French state in 2014 that the first three-factor model they developed in 1993 does not adequately account for certain observed inconsistencies in predicted returns. As a consequence, Fama and French enhanced the three-factor model by adding two new variables: profitability and investment. The justification for these two factors arises from the theoretical implications of the dividend discount model (DDM), which claims that profitability and investment help to explain the returns achieved from the HML element in the first model (Fama and French, 2015).

Surprisingly, unlike the Carhart model, the new Fama-French model does not incorporate the momentum element. This is mostly because to Fama’s position on momentum. While not denying its existence, Fama thinks that the degree of risk borne by securities in an efficient market cannot fluctuate so dramatically that it justifies the necessity to recognize the momentum factor’s involvement (Fama and French, 2015). According to the Fama-French five-factor model, the return on any security is calculated as follows:

FF_5F

  • 𝛽P is the measure of the risk related to the profitability factor of the security/portfolio
  • 𝑅𝑀𝑊 (which stands for “Robust Minus Weak”) measures the difference in expected returns between securities that exhibit strong profitability levels (thus making them “robust”) and securities that show inconsistent profitability levels (thus making them “weak”)
  • 𝛽𝐼 is the measure of the risk related to the investment factor of the asset
  • 𝐶𝑀𝐴 (which stands for “Conservative Minus Aggressive”) measures the difference in expected returns between securities that engage in limited investment activities (thus making them “conservative”) and securities that show high levels of investment activity (thus making them “aggressive”).

To validate the new model, Fama and French created many portfolios with considerable returns disparities due to size, value, profitability, and investing characteristics. Additionally, they completed two exercises:

  • The first is a regression of portfolio results versus the improved model. This was done to determine the extent to which it explains the observed returns disparities between the selected portfolios
  • The second is to compare the new model’s performance to that of the three-factor model. This was done to determine if the new five-factor model adequately accounts for the observed returns differences in the old three-factor model. The following summarizes Fama and French’s conclusions about the new model.

The HML component becomes superfluous in terms of structure, since any value contribution to a security’s return can already be accounted by market, size, investment, and profitability factors. Thus, Fama and French advise investors and scholars to disregard the HML effect if their primary objective is to explain extraordinary returns (Fama and French, 2015).

They do, however, argue for the inclusion of all five elements when attempting to explain portfolio returns that display size, value, profitability, and investment tilts. Additionally, the model explains between 69% and 93% of the return disparities seen following the usage of the prior three-factor model (Fama and French, 2015). This new model, however, is not without flaws. Blitz, Hanauer, Vidojevic, and van Vliet (henceforth referred to as BHVV) identified five problems with the new Fama-French five-factor model in their 2016 paper “Five difficulties with the Five-Factor model”.

While two of these issues are related to some of the original Fama-French three factor model’s original factors (most notably the continued existence within the model of the CAPM relationship between market risk and return, as well as the new model’s overall acceptance by the academic community while some of the original factors are still contested), several of the other issues are related to other factors. These concerns include the following (Fama and French, 2015) :

  • The lack of motion
  • The new factors introduced lack robustness. The questions here include historical (i.e., will these factors apply to data points before to 1963) and if these aspects also apply to other asset types
  • The absence of adequate empirical support for the implementation of these Fama and French components

Use of the asset pricing models

All the models presented above are mostly employed in asset management to analyze the performance of an actively managed portfolio and the overall performance of a mutual fund.

Why should I be interested in this post?

In the CAPM, the factor is the market factor representing the global uncertainty of the market. In the late 1970s, the portfolio management industry aimed to capture the market portfolio return, but as financial research advanced and certain significant contributions were made, this gave rise to other factor characteristics to capture some additional performance. Analyzing the historical contributions that underpins factor investing is fundamental in order to have a better understanding of the subject.

Useful resources

Academic research

Blitz, D., Hanauer M.X., Vidojevic M., van Vliet, P., 2018. Five Concerns with the Five-Factor Model, The Journal of Portfolio Management, 44(4): 71-78.

Carhart, M.M. (1997), On Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance. The Journal of Finance, 52: 57-82.

Fama, E.F., French, K.R., 1992. The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns. The Journal of Finance, 47: 427-465.

Fama, E.F., French, K.R., 2004. The Capital Asset Pricing Model: Theory and Evidence. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18(3): 25-46.

Fama, E.F., French, K.R., 2015. A five-factor asset pricing model. Journal of Financial Economics, 116(1): 1-22.

Lintner, J. 1965a. The Valuation of Risk Assets and the Selection of Risky Investments in Stock Portfolios and Capital Budgets. The Review of Economics and Statistics 47(1): 13-37.

Lintner, J. 1965b. Security Prices, Risk and Maximal Gains from Diversification. The Journal of Finance 20(4): 587-615.

Mangram, M.E., 2013. A simplified perspective of the Markowitz Portfolio Theory. Global Journal of Business Research, 7(1): 59-70.

Markowitz, H., 1952. Portfolio Selection. The Journal of Finance, 7(1): 77-91.

Mossin, J. 1966. Equilibrium in a Capital Asset Market. Econometrica 34(4): 768-783.

Sharpe, W.F. 1963. A Simplified Model for Portfolio Analysis. Management Science 9(2): 277-293.

Sharpe, W.F. 1964. Capital Asset Prices: A theory of Market Equilibrium under Conditions of Risk. The Journal of Finance 19(3): 425-442.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

Factor investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Factor Investing

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Is smart beta really smart?

Factors

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ LYoussef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Quality Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Growth Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility Factor

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)

Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)

Jayati WALIA

In this article, Jayati WALIA (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022) presents the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM).

Introduction

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is a widely used metrics for the financial analysis of the performance of stocks. It shows the relationship between the expected return and the systematic risk of investing in an asset. The idea behind the model is that the higher the risk in an investment in securities, the higher the returns an investor should expect on his/her investments.

The Capital Asset Pricing Model was developed by financial economists William Sharpe, John Lintner, Jack Treynor and Jan Mossin independently in the 1960s. The CAPM is essentially built on the concepts of the Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), especially the mean-variance analysis model by Harry Markowitz (1952).

CAPM is very often used in the finance industry to calculate the cost of equity or expected returns from a security which is essentially the discount rate. It is an important tool to compute the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC). The discount rate is then used to ascertain the Present Value (PV) and Net Present Value (NPV) of any business or financial investment.

CAPM formula

The main result of the CAPM is a simple mathematical formula that links the expected return of an asset to its risk measured by the beta of the asset:

CAPM risk beta relation

Where:

  • E(ri) represents the expected return of asset i
  • rf the risk-free rate
  • βi the measure of the risk of asset i
  • E(rm) the expected return of the market
  • E(rm)- rf the market risk premium.

The risk premium for asset i is equal to βi(E(rm)- rf), that is the beta of asset i, βi, multiplied by the risk premium for the market, E(rm)- rf.

The formula shows that investors demand a return higher than the risk-free rate for taking higher risk. The equity risk premium is the component that reflects the excess return investors require on their investment.

Let us discuss the components of the Capital Asset Pricing Model individually:

Expected return of the asset: E(ri)

The expected return of the asset is essentially the minimum return that the investor should demand when investing his/her money in the asset. It can also be considered as the discount rate the investor can utilize to ascertain the value of the asset.

Risk-free interest rate: rf

The risk-free interest rate is usually taken as the yield on debt issued by the government (the 3-month Treasury bills and the 10-year Treasury bonds in the US) as they are the safest investments. As government bonds have very rare chances of default, their interest rates are considered risk-free.

Beta: β

The beta is a measure of the systematic or the non-diversifiable risk of an asset. This essentially means the sensitivity of an asset price compared to the overall market. The market beta is equal to 1. A beta greater than 1 for an asset signifies that the asset is riskier compared to the overall market, and a beta of less than 1 signifies that the asset is less risky compared to the overall market.

The beta is calculated by using the equation:

CAPM beta formula

Where:

  • Cov(ri, rm) represents the covariance of the return of asset i with the return of the market
  • σ2(rm) the variance of the return of the market.

The beta of an asset is defined as the ratio of the covariance between the asset return and the market return, and the variance of the market return.

The covariance is a measure of correlation between two random variables. In practice, the covariance is calculated using historical data for the asset return and the market return.

The variance is a measure of the dispersion of returns. The standard deviation, equal to the square root of the variance, is a measure of the volatility in the market returns over time.

Expected market return

The expected market return is usually computed using historical data of the market. The market is usually represented by a stock index to which the stock belongs to.

For example, for calculating the expected return on APPLE stock, we usually consider the S&P 500 index. Historically, the expected return for the S&P 500 index is around 9%.

Assumptions in Capital Asset Pricing Model

The CAPM considers the following assumptions which forms the basis for the model:

  • Investors are risk averse and rational – In the CAPM, all investors are assumed to be risk averse. They diversify their portfolio which neutralizes the non-systematic or the diversifiable risk. So, in the end only the systematic or the market risk is considered to calculate the expected returns on the security.
  • Efficient markets – The markets are assumed to be efficient, thus all investors have equal access to the same information. Also, all the assets are considered to be liquid, and an individual investor cannot influence the future prices of an asset.
  • No transaction costs – The CAPM assumes that there are no transaction costs, taxes, and restrictions on borrowing or lending activities.
  • Risk premium – The CAPM model assumes that investors require higher premium for more risk they take (risk aversion).

Example

As an example, lest us consider an investor who wants to calculate the expected return on an investment in APPLE stock. Let’s see how the CAPM can be used in this case.

The risk-free interest rate is taken to be the current yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds. Let us assume that its value is 3%.

The S&P 500 index has an expected return of 9%.

The beta on APPLE stock is 1.25.

The expected return on APPLE stock is equal to 3% + 1.25*(9% – 3%) = 10.50%

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   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Capital Market Line (CML)

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Security Market Line (SML)

   ▶ Akshit GUPTA Asset Allocation

   ▶ Jayati WALIA Linear Regression

Useful resources

Acadedmic articles

Lintner, J. (1965) The Valuation of Risk Assets and the Selection of Risky Investments in Stock Portfolios and Capital Budgets The Review of Economics and Statistics 47(1) 13-37.

Markowitz, H. (1952) Portfolio Selection The Journal of Finance 7(1) 77-91.

Mossin, J. (1966) Equilibrium in a Capital Asset Market Econometrica 34(4) 768-783.

Merton, R.C. (1973) An Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model Econometrica 41(5) 867-887.

Sharpe, W.F. (1964) Capital Asset Prices: A Theory of Market Equilibrium Under Conditions of Risk The Journal of Finance 19(3) 425-442.

Business sources

Mullins, D.W. Jr (1982) Does the Capital Asset Pricing Model Work? Harvard Business Review.

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Jayati WALIA (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022).

Quantitative risk management

Quantitative risk management

Jayati WALIA

In this article, Jayati WALIA (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022) presents Quantitative risk management.

Introduction

Risk refers to the degree of uncertainty in the future value of an investment or the potential losses that may occur. Risk management forms an integral part of any financial institution to safeguard the investments against different risks. The key question that forms the backbone for any risk management strategy is the degree of variability in the profit and loss statement for any investment.

The process of the risk management has three major phases. The first phase is risk identification which mainly focuses on identifying the risk factors to which the institution is exposed. This is followed by risk measurement that can be based on different types of metrics, from monitoring of open positions to using statistical models and Value-at-Risk. Finally, in the third phase risk management is performed by setting risk limits based on the determined risk appetite, back testing (testing the quality of the models on the historical data) and stress testing (assessing the impact of severe but still plausible adverse scenarios).

Different types of risks

There are several types of risks inherent in any investment. They can be categorized in the following ways:

Market risk

An institution can invest in a broad list of financial products including stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, derivatives, and interest rate swaps. Market risk essentially refers to the risk arising from the fluctuation in the market prices of these assets that an institution trades or invests in. The changes in prices of these underlying assets due to market volatility can cause financial losses and hence, to analyze and hedge against this risk, institutions must constantly monitor the performance of the assets. After measuring the risk, they must also implement necessary measures to mitigate these risks to protect the institution’s capital. Several types of market risks include interest rate risk, equity risk, currency risk, credit spread risk etc.

Credit risk

The risk of not receiving promised repayments due to the counterparty failing to meet its obligations is essentially credit risk. The counterparty risk can arise from changes in the credit rating of the issuer or the client or a default on a due obligation. The default risk can arise from non-payments on any loans offered to the institution’s clients or partners. After the financial crisis of 2008-09, the importance of measuring and mitigating credit risks has increased many folds since the crisis was mainly caused by defaults on payments on sub-prime mortgages.

Operational risk

The risk of financial losses resulting from failed or faulty internal processes, people (human error or fraud) or system, or from external events like fraud, natural calamities, terrorism etc. refers to operational risk. Operational risks are generally difficult to measure and may cause potentially high impacts that cannot be anticipated.

Liquidity risk

The liquidity risk comprises to 2 types namely, market liquidity risk and funding liquidity risk. In market liquidity risk can arise from lack of marketability of an underlying asset i.e., the assets are comparatively illiquid or difficult to sell given a low market demand. Funding liquidity risk on the other hand refers to the ease with which institutions can raise funding and thus institutions must ensure that they can raise and retain debt capital to meet the margin or collateral calls on their leveraged positions.

Strategic risk

Strategic risks can arise from a poor strategic business decisions and include legal risk, reputational risk and systematic and model risks.

Basel Committee on Banking Supervision

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) was formed in 1974 by central bankers from the G10 countries. The committee is headquartered in the office of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. BCBS is the primary global standard setter for the prudential regulation of banks and provides a forum for regular cooperation on banking supervisory matters. Its 45 members comprise central banks and bank supervisors from 28 jurisdictions. Member countries include Australia, Belgium, Canada, Brazil, China, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany, India, Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa among many others.

Over the years, BCBS has developed influential policy recommendations concerning international banking and financial regulations in order to exercise judicious corporate governance and risk management (especially market, credit and operational risks), known as the Basel Accords. The key function of Basel accords is to manage banks’ capital requirements and ensure they hold enough cash reserves to meet their respective financial obligations and henceforth survive in any financial and/or economic distress.

Over the years, the following versions of the Basel accords have been released in order to enhance international banking regulatory frameworks and improve the sector’s ability to manage with financial distress, improve risk management and promote transparency:

Basel I

The first of the Basel accords, Basel I (also known as Basel Capital Accord) was developed in 1988 and implemented in the G10 countries by 1992. The regulations intended to improve the stability of the financial institutions by setting minimum capital reserve requirements for international banks and provided a framework for managing of credit risk through the risk-weighting of different assets which was also used for assessing banks’ credit worthiness.
However, there were many limitations to this accord, one of which being that Basel I only focused on credit risk ignoring other risk types like market risk, operational risk, strategic risk, macroeconomic conditions etc. that were not covered by the regulations. Also, the requirements posed by the accord were nearly the same for all banks, no matter what the bank’s risk level and activity type.

Basel II

Basel II regulations were developed in 2004 as an extension of Basel I, with a more comprehensive risk management framework and thereby including standardized measures for managing credit, operational and market risks. Basel II strengthened corporate supervisory mechanisms and market transparency by developing disclosure requirements for international regulations inducing market discipline.

Basel III

After the 2008 Financial Crisis, it was perceived by the BCBS that the Basel regulations still needed to be strengthened in areas like more efficient coverage of banks’ risk exposures and quality and measure of the regulatory capital corresponding to banks’ risks.
Basel III intends to correct the miscalculations of risk that were believed to have contributed to the crisis by requiring banks to hold higher percentages of their assets in more liquid instruments and get funding through more equity than debt. Basel III thus tries to strengthen resilience and reduce the risk of system-wide financial shocks and prevent future economic credit events. The Basel III regulations were introduced in 2009 and the implementation deadline was initially set for 2015 however, due to conflicting negotiations it has been repeatedly postponed and currently set to January 1, 2022.

Risk Measures

Efficient risk measurement based on relevant risk measures is a fundamental pillar of the risk management. The following are common measures used by institutions to facilitate quantitative risk management:

Value at risk (VaR)

VaR is the most extensively used risk measure and essentially refers to the maximum loss that should not be exceeded during a specific period of time with a given probability. VaR is mainly used to calculate minimum capital requirements for institutions that are needed to fulfill their financial obligations, decide limits for asset management and allocation, calculate insurance premiums based on risk and set margin for derivatives transactions.
To estimate market risk, we model the statistical distribution of the changes in the market position. Usual models used for the task include normal distribution, the historical distribution and the distributions based on Monte Carlo simulations.

Expected Shortfall

The Expected Shortfall (ES) (also known as Conditional VaR (CVaR), Average Value at risk (AVaR), Expected Tail Loss (ETL) or Beyond the VaR (BVaR)) is a statistic measure used to quantify the market risk of a portfolio. This measure represents the expected loss when it is greater than the value of the VaR calculated with a specific probability level (also known as confidence level).

Credit Risk Measures

Probability of Default (PD) is the probability that a borrower may default on his debt over a period of 1 year. Exposure at Default (EAD) is the expected amount outstanding in case the borrower defaults and Loss given Default (LGD) refers to the amount expected to lose by the lender as a proportion of the EAD. Thus the expected loss in case of default is calculated as PD*EAD*LGD.

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   ▶ Jayati WALIA Value at Risk

   ▶ Akshit GUPTA Options

   ▶ Jayati WALIA Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model

Useful resources

Articles

Longin F. (1996) The asymptotic distribution of extreme stock market returns Journal of Business, 63, 383-408.

Longin F. (2000) From VaR to stress testing : the extreme value approach Journal of Banking and Finance, 24, 1097-1130.

Longin F. and B. Solnik (2001) Extreme correlation of international equity markets Journal of Finance, 56, 651-678.

Books

Embrechts P., C. Klüppelberg and T Mikosch (1997) Modelling Extremal Events for Insurance and Finance.

Embrechts P., R. Frey, McNeil A. J. (2022) Quantitative Risk Management, Princeton University Press.

Gumbel, E. J. (1958) Statistics of extremes. New York: Columbia University Press.

Longin F. (2016) Extreme events in finance: a handbook of extreme value theory and its applications Wiley Editions.
Corporate Finance Institute Basel Accords

Other materials

Extreme Events in Finance

QRM Tutorial

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Jayati WALIA (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022).

Brownian Motion in Finance

Brownian Motion in Finance

Jayati WALIA

In this article, Jayati WALIA (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022) explains the Brownian motion and its applications in finance to model asset prices like stocks traded in financial markets.

Introduction

Stock price movements form a random pattern. The prices fluctuate everyday resulting from market forces like supply and demand, company valuation and earnings, and economic factors like inflation, liquidity, demographics of country and investors, political developments, etc. Market participants try to anticipate stock prices using all these factors and contribute to make price movements random by their trading activities as the financial and economics worlds are constantly changing.

What is a Brownian Motion?

The Brownian motion was first introduced by botanist Robert Brown who observed the random movement of pollen particles due to water molecules under a microscope. It was in the 1900s that the French mathematician Louis Bachelier applied the concept of Brownian motion to asset price behavior for the first time, and this led to Brownian motion becoming one of the most important fundamental of modern quantitative finance. In Bachelier’s theory, price fluctuations observed over a small time period are independent of the current price along with historical behavior of price movements. Combining his assumptions with the Central Limit Theorem, he also deduces that the random behavior of prices can be said to be represented by a normal distribution (Gaussian distribution).

This led to the development of the Random Walk Hypothesis or Random Walk Theory, as it is known today in modern finance. A random walk is a statistical phenomenon wherein stock prices move randomly.

When the time step of a random walk is made infinitesimally small, the random walk becomes a Brownian motion.

Standard Brownian Motion

In context of financial stochastic processes, the Brownian motion is also described as the Wiener Process that is a continuous stochastic process with normally distributed increments. Using the Wiener process notation, an asset price model in continuous time can be expressed as:

brownian motion equation

with dS being the change in asset price in continuous time dt. dX is the random variable from the normal distribution (N(0, 1) or Wiener process). σ is assumed to be constant and represents the price volatility considering the unexpected changes that can result from external effects. μdt together represents the deterministic return within the time interval with μ representing the growth rate of asset price or the ‘drift’.

When the market is modeled with a standard Brownian Motion, the probability distribution function of the future price is a normal distribution.

Geometric Brownian Motion

weiner notation

with dS being the change in asset price in continuous time dt. dX is the random variable from the normal distribution (N(0, 1) or Wiener process). σ is assumed to be constant and represents the price volatility considering the unexpected changes that can result from external effects. μdt together represents the deterministic return within the time interval with μ representing the growth rate of asset price or the ‘drift’.

When the market is modeled with a geometric Brownian Motion, the probability distribution function of the future price is a log-normal distribution.

Properties of a Brownian Motion

  • Continuity: Brownian motion is the continuous time-limit of the discrete time random walk. It thus, has no discontinuities and is non-differential everywhere.
  • Finite: The time increments are scaled with the square root of the times steps such that the Brownian motion is finite and non-zero always.
  • Normality: Brownian motion is normally distributed with zero mean and non-zero standard deviation.
  • Martingale and Markov Property: Martingale property states that the conditional expectation of the future value of a stochastic process depends on the current value, given information about previous events. The Markov property instead focusses on the ‘no memory’ theory that the expected future value of a stochastic process does not depend on any past values except the current value. Brownian motion follows both these properties.

Simulating Random Walks for Stock Prices

In quantitative finance, a random walk can be simulated programmatically through coding languages. This is essential because these simulations can be used to represent potential future prices of assets and securities and work out problems like derivatives pricing and portfolio risk evaluation.

A very popular mathematical technique of doing this is through the Monte Carlo simulations. In option pricing, the Monte Carlo simulation method is used to generate multiple random walks depicting the price movements of the underlying, each with an associated simulated payoff for the option. These payoffs are discounted back to the present value and the average of these discounted values is set as the option price. Similarly, it can be used for pricing other derivatives, but the Monte Carlo simulation method is more commonly used in portfolio and risk management.

For instance, consider Microsoft stock that has a current price of $258.65 with a growth trend of 55.2% and a volatility of 35.92%.

A plot of daily returns represented as a random normal distribution is:

Normal Distribution

The above figure represents the simulated price path according to the Geometric Brownian motion for the Microsoft stock price. Similarly, a plot of 10 such simulations would be like this:

Microsoft GBM Simulations

Thus, we can see that with just 10 simulations, the prices range from $100 to over $600. We can increase the number of simulations to expand the data set for analysis and use the results for derivatives pricing and many other financial applications.

Brownian motion and the efficient market hypothesis

If the market is efficient in the weak sense (as introduced by Fama (1970)), the current price incorporates all information contained in past prices and the best forecast of the future price is the current price. This is the case when the market price is modelled by a Brownian motion.

Related Posts

   ▶ Jayati WALIA Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model

   ▶ Jayati WALIA Plain Vanilla Options

   ▶ Jayati WALIA Derivatives Market

Useful Resources

Academic articles

Fama E. (1970) Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work, Journal of Finance, 25, 383-417.

Fama E. (1991) Efficient Capital Markets: II Journal of Finance, 46, 1575-617.

Books

Malkiel B.G. (2020) A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing, WW Norton & Co.

Code

Python code for graphs and simulations

Brownian Motion

What is the random walk theory?

About the author

The article was written in August 2021 by Jayati WALIA (ESSEC Business School, Grande Ecole Program – Master in Management, 2019-2022).

Growth Factor

Growth Factor

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents the growth factor, which is based on a risk factor that aims to get exposure to firms with high growth potential based on a variety of parameters such as historical profits, sales, and expected earnings.

This article is structured as follows: we begin by defining the growth factor and reviewing academic studies. The MSCI Growth Factor Index, which is well used as a benchmark in the asset management industry, is next presented in terms of performance and risk-return trade-off. We showcase the ETF market for investors looking to profit from the growth factor.

Definition

In the world of investing, a factor is any aspect that helps explain an asset’s long-term risk and return performance. In the late 1970s, the portfolio management industry’s objective was to capture the market return on a portfolio. As a result of Markowitz and Tobin’s earlier research, William Sharpe, John Lintner, and Jan Mossin independently developed the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). Because it enabled investors to properly value assets in terms of systematic risk, the CAPM was a significant evolutionary step forward in the theory of capital market equilibrium (Mangram, 2013).

Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, following the CAPM’s original work, developed the Fama-French Three-Factor model in 1993 to solve the CAPM’s inadequacies. It claims that, in addition to the market risk component of the CAPM, two other factors have an effect on the returns on securities and portfolios: market capitalization (called the “size” factor) and the book-to-market ratio (referred to as the “value” factor). Other factor characteristics were developed to capture some additional performance as financial research advanced and significant contributions were made.

Academic research

The fundamental work of Fama and French may be traced back to the most significant academic works in the factor investing literature. Since the growth factor has a poor academic literature review, we will focus on the work of Fama and French (1993). In response to the CAPM’s limitations, Eugene Fama and Kenneth French developed the Fama-French three-factor model in 1993. It argues that, in addition to the market risk component provided by the CAPM, two additional factors, market capitalization (referred as “size”) and book-to-market ratio (referred as “value”), influence the returns on securities and portfolios. The major rationale for including these attributes, according to Fama and French, is that both size and book-to-market ratios are connected to the economic fundamentals of the firm issuing the securities (Fama and French, 1993).

In 2014, Fama and French claimed that their original three-factor model from 1993 was insufficient to explain certain observed differences in expected returns. As a result, Fama and French expanded their three-factor model to include two more factors: profitability and investment. The theoretical implications of the dividend discount model (DDM), which claim that profitability and investment contribute to the explanation of the returns derived from the High Minus Low premium element in the first model, justify these two aspects (Fama and French, 2015). High Minus Low can be defined as the value premium that accounts for the spread between the return of small capitalization stocks compared to large capitalization stocks.

Active managers have utilized the Growth factor to capture corporate growth possibilities using historical profits, sales, and anticipated earnings, and it has been employed as a possible source of alpha. The impact of unintended exposure, which shows that assets with strong growth can also have high valuations, high volatility, low yield, and bad quality, which can negatively influence portfolio performance, can be a difficulty when using simple selection methods to capture growth (MSCI Factor research, 2021).

Growth investing, often known as capital growth or capital appreciation, has been a prominent investment strategy since the 1950s and is one of active managers’ most intuitive and commonly used investment strategies (MSCI Factor research, 2021). Growth is a well-known investment strategy that, according to risk models, has a strong explanatory power in risk forecasting. In comparison to the MSCI ACWI Index, the pure growth factor has shown an impressive long-term return as well as low or negative correlation with other factors, which may assist diversify a multi-factor portfolio by minimizing short-term cyclicality.

Example of a “growth” stock

Any stock in a firm that is expected to expand at a pace significantly higher than the market average is considered a growth stock. Dividends are seldom paid on these stocks. This is because growth stock issuers are often businesses that seek to reinvest any profits in order to increase growth in the short term. When people buy growth stocks, they expect to profit from capital gains when they sell them later (Investopedia, 2021).

For instance, Amazon Inc. (AMZN) has been regarded as a growth stock for quite some time. It is, and has been for some time, one of the world’s largest companies in 2020. In terms of market value as of July 31, 2021, Amazon is among the top five U.S. stocks.

MSCI Growth Factor Index

MSCI Factor Indexes are rules-based, transparent indexes that target equities with favorable factor qualities, as determined by academic discoveries and empirical outcomes, and are designed for easy implementation, replicability, and usage in both standard indexed and active portfolios.

MSCI Growth Factor Index accounts for unexpected risks and exposures while also extending the notion of growth at a reasonable price (GARP) to include volatility, yield, and quality (MSCI Factor research, 2021). The impact of unintended exposure, which shows that assets with strong growth can also have high valuations, high volatility, low yield, and bad quality, which can negatively influence portfolio performance, can be a difficulty when using simple selection methods to capture growth. MSCI’s growth target index accounts for unexpected risks and exposures while also extending the notion of growth at a reasonable price (GARP) to include volatility, yield, and quality. Growth at a reasonable price (GARP), a long-held notion among growth investors, aims to avoid overpaying for a stock’s prospective growth. The GARP idea may be expanded by limiting value exposure, ensuring that the long-term premium for growth is not reduced by the unintentional and accidental impact of assets with high values, i.e., negative value exposure.

Performance of the MSCI Growth Factor Index

Figure 1 compares the MSCI Growth Factor Index’s performance to those of other factors from May 1999 to May 2020. All indices are rebalanced on a 100-point scale to ensure consistency in performance and to facilitate factor comparisons.

Figure 1. Performance of the MSCI Growth Factor Index from 1999-2020.
Growth factor performance
Source: MSCI Factor research, 2021.

Over the long run, the MSCI World Growth Index has traditionally delivered excess returns, with a yearly return of 1.41 percent over the MSCI World Index since 1999, as seen above. (MSCI Factor research, 2021).

Risk-return profile of MSCI Growth Factor Index

Figure 2 shows the MSCI Growth Factor Index compared to other factors over the period May 1999 – May 2020 in terms of risk/reward. The risk-return trade-off states that the potential return rises with an increase in risk. Individuals connect low levels of uncertainty about future returns with low potential returns, while high levels of uncertainty or risk are associated with large potential returns. According to the risk-return trade-off, an investor’s money can generate higher returns only if the investor is willing to endure a higher risk of loss and return (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Risk-return profile of MSCI Growth Factor Index compared to a peer group.
Growth factor risk return
Source: MSCI Factor research, 2021.

Growth stocks are defined as firms that are projected to expand their sales, profits, or margins faster than the industry or market average. The growth factor may provide value to a multi-factor portfolio by mitigating short-term cyclicality and providing asset managers with diversity and a stable source of premia. MSCI developed the Growth Target Index, based on Barra’s equity index model characteristics, through an optimization process that captures the growth component while limiting unwanted exposures that might erode the growth premium (MSCI Factor research, 2021).

ETFs for the growth factor

Let us recall that an Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) is an investment vehicle that seeks to mirror the performance of a benchmark like an equity index and is traded on a continuous basis during the day like stocks. By investing in ETFs, an investor gains access to a plethora of diversification options through several asset classes (equity, bonds, currency, commodity, real estate, etc.).

In terms of proportion of assets under management, Figure 3 depicts the total ETF distribution among the leading suppliers of growth factor ETFs. Despite the lack of a real monopoly, the market is more equally distributed.

It’s worth mentioning the ARK Innovation ETF, which accounts for almost a third of the entire growth ETF market that was nominated. This ETF invests on biotech, robotics, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and finance technology, among other areas. It’s a thematically focused fund that invests in a limited number of high-growth companies and makes large swings in them.

The fund’s top 10 holdings make up nearly half of the overall portfolio. The company’s largest investment is Tesla (TSLA), which accounts for about 11% of its assets, followed by Square (SQ), Teladoc Health (TDOC), and Roku (ROKU), which account for 6.5 percent, 6.3 percent, and 5.5 percent, respectively. The top 10 companies include Zillow Group (Z), Zoom Video Communications (ZM), Baidu (BIDU), Shopify (SHOP), Spotify Technology (SPOT), and Exact Sciences (EXAS). The ARK Innovation ETF (ticker: ARKK) had a 153 percent return in 2020 (etf.com, 2021).

Figure 3. Growth factor ETF market.
Growth factor market share
Source: etf.com (2021).

Table 1 gives more detailed information about the biggest growth factor ETF providers: the asset under management (AUM), expense ratio (ER) and the segment for the investments.

Table 1. Ranking of the biggest Growth ETF providers.
Growth factor actors
Source: etf.com (2021).

Why should I be interested in this post?

If you are an undergraduate or graduate student in a business school or at the university, you may have seen in your 101 finance course the CAPM related to the market factor. This post makes aware of the existence of another risk factor priced by the market.

If you are an investor, you may consider adding an exposure to growth factor to enhance the overall portfolio return.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

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   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Quality Factor

Useful resources

Academic research

Fama, E.F., French, K.R. 1992. The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns. The Journal of Finance, 47: 427-465.

Fama, E.F., French, K.R., A five-factor asset pricing model, Journal of Financial Economics, 116(1): 2015, 1-22.

Mangram, M.E., 2013. A simplified perspective of the Markowitz Portfolio Theory. Global Journal of Business Research, 7(1): 59-70.

Business analysis

etf.com, 2021. Biggest Growth ETF providers.

MSCI Investment Research, 2021. Factor Focus: Growth.

Investopedia, 2021. Growth Stock.

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).

Quality Factor

Quality Factor

Youssef_Louraoui

In this article, Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021) presents the quality factor, which is based on a risk factor that aims to get exposure to businesses with long-term business plans and competitive advantages.

This article is structured as follows: we begin by defining the quality factor and reviewing academic studies. The MSCI Quality Factor Index, which is well used as a benchmark in the asset management industry, is next presented in terms of performance and risk-return trade-off. We showcase the ETF market for investors looking to profit from the quality factor.

Definition

In the world of investing, a factor is any characteristic that helps explain an asset’s long-term risk and return performance. In the late 1970s, the portfolio management industry’s objective was to capture the market return on a portfolio. As a result of Markowitz and Tobin’s earlier research, William Sharpe, John Lintner, and Jan Mossin independently developed the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). Because it enabled investors to properly value assets in terms of systematic risk, the CAPM was a significant evolutionary step forward in the theory of capital market equilibrium (Mangram, 2013).

Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, following the CAPM’s original work, developed the Fama-French Three-Factor model in 1993 to solve the CAPM’s inadequacies. It claims that, in addition to the market risk component of the CAPM, two other factors have an effect on the returns on securities and portfolios: market capitalization (called the “size” factor) and the book-to-market ratio (referred to as the “value” factor). Other factor characteristics were developed to capture some additional performance as financial research advanced and significant contributions were made.

The quality factor is based on a risk factor that aims to get exposure to businesses with long-term business plans and competitive advantages. It can also be defined as the attributes for which investors are prepared to pay a premium (Hsu et al., 2019).

Academic research

The long-term outperformance of the quality factor over the market is well documented in the financial literature. Eugene Fama and Kenneth French added two quality-related components to their distinctive three-factor model (firm size, business value, and market risk): profitability and asset growth. Numerous active strategies have prioritized quality growth in their premium selection and portfolio construction processes. In 2012, Robert Novy-Marx published an essay proving that profitability and stability were just as useful as traditional value measures for assessing returns (MSCI Factor research, 2021).

Asness et al. (2018) propose a valuation model that illustrates how stock prices should increase if qualitative qualities such as profitability, growth, and safety improve. They demonstrate experimentally that high-quality stocks do fetch a premium on average, but not by a huge margin (Asness et al., 2018). Perhaps as a result of this perplexingly little influence of quality on price, high-quality stocks provide appealing risk-adjusted returns. Indeed, in the United States and 24 other countries, a factor that invests in high-quality companies and shorts low-quality companies generates significant risk-adjusted returns. The price of quality fluctuates throughout time, reaching a low point during the internet bubble, and a low price of quality suggests that QMJ will give a high rate of return in the future. Analysts’ price targets and earnings predictions indicate that systemic errors in return and earnings expectations are occurring as a result of quality issues (Asness et al., 2018).

MSCI Quality Factor Index

MSCI Factor Indexes are rule-based, transparent indexes that target equities with favorable factor qualities, as determined by academic discoveries and empirical outcomes, and are designed for easy implementation, replicability, and usage in both standard indexed and active portfolios. The MSCI Quality Factor Index measures the quality factor using three fundamental variables (MSCI Factor research, 2021) :

  • Return on equity – a measure of a company in generating profits
  • Debt to equity – a measure of a company’s leverage
  • Earnings variability – a measure of how smooth earnings growth has been.

Quality is a “defensive” component, which means that it has historically benefited during periods of economic recession (MSCI Factor research, 2021). The quality factor has aided in explaining the performance of equities with low debt, steady profits, and a high profit margin.

Performance of the MSCI Quality Factor Index from

Figure 1 compares the MSCI Quality Factor Index’s performance to those of other factors from May 1999 to May 2020. All indices are rebalanced on a 100-point scale to ensure consistency in performance and to facilitate factor comparisons

Figure 1. Performance of the MSCI Quality Factor Index from 1999-2020.

Quality_factor_performance

Source: MSCI Factor research (2021).

The MSCI Quality Factor Index has traditionally outperformed the MSCI World Index in the long term, with a 1.98 percent annual return over the MSCI World Index since 1999, as seen below (MSCI Factor research, 2021).

Risk-return profile of MSCI Quality Factor Index

Figure 2 shows the MSCI Quality Factor Index compared to other factors over the period May 1999 – May 2020 in terms of risk/reward. The risk-return trade-off states that the potential return rises with an increase in risk. Individuals connect low levels of uncertainty about future returns with low potential returns, while high levels of uncertainty or risk are associated with large potential returns. According to the risk-return trade-off, an investor’s money can generate higher returns only if the investor is willing to endure a higher risk of loss as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Risk-return profile of MSCI Yield Factor Index compared to a peer group.

Quality_factor_riskreturn

Source: MSCI Factor research (2021).

Behavior of the MSCI Quality Factor Index during the Covid-19 crisis

The Covid-19 crisis has not only caused significant social and economic suffering, but it had also an impact on financial markets. To study the behavior of the factors during the Covid-19 crisis, we compute the return of the MSCI Factor indexes during the different stages of the crisis. The MSCI Factor indexes are: value, size, quality, momentum and minimum volatility. Following Pagano et al. (2020) and Hasaj and Sherer (2021), we decompose the Covid-19 crisis into five stages: origin, incubation, outbreak, fever, and treatment. Each stage is described below.

  • Origin (01/11/2019 – 01/01/2020): the first instances are reported in Wuhan, China.
  • Incubation (02/01/2020 – 17/01/2020): during this phase, the number of patients began to rise at a faster rate, raising concerns about the disease’s severity.
  • Outbreak (20/01/2020 – 21/02/2020): the number of cases rose to the point that the World Health Organization (WHO) decided that this illness may pose a major threat to the world’s population, and the pandemic was proclaimed.
  • Fever (24/02/2020 – 20/03/2020): markets are extremely volatile, owing to government restrictions aimed at flattening the infection curve, with the decision to impose a lockdown in numerous nations as the most notable measures, among others.
  • Treatment (23/03/2020 – 15/04/2020): most of this turnaround occurs between March and June 2020, which corresponds with the start of good news about the discovery and widespread use of the vaccine.

Table 1 gives the performance of the MSCI factor indexes during the different stages of the Covid-19 crisis. Performance is measured by the return computed on the time-period of each stage, and then annualized for comparison across the different stages. We use data are from Thomson Reuters.

Table 1. Performance of the MSCI factor indexes during the Covid-19 crisis.

Performance_MSCI_Factor_Indexes_COVID-19_Crisis

Source: computation by the author. Data source: Thomson Reuters.

A conclusive statement can be made based on our analysis. The quality component was the strongest performer throughout the COVID crisis’s inception in late 2020 and during the fever phase, when severe limitations were implemented, resulting in a collapsing market.

ETFs to capture the Quality factor

Let us recall that an Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) is an investment vehicle that seeks to mirror the performance of a benchmark like an equity index and is traded on a continuous basis during the day like stocks. By investing in ETFs, an investor gains access to a plethora of diversification options through several asset classes (equity, bonds, currency, commodity, real estate, etc.).

Figure 3 illustrates the overall ETF distribution of the major providers of quality factor ETFs in terms of percentage of asset under management. By examining the market overview for quality factor investments, we can observe SPDR dominance in this factor investing market, with 76.07%, representing more than three quarters of the overall quality factor ETF market.

Figure 3. Quality factor ETF market.

Quality_factor_marketshare

Source: etf.com (2021).

Table 2 gives more detailed information about the biggest quality factor ETF providers: the asset under management (AUM), expense ratio (ER) and the segment for the investments.

Table 2. Ranking of the biggest Quality ETF providers.

Quality_factor_actors

Source: etf.com (2021).

Why should I be interested in this post?

If you are an undergraduate or graduate student at a business school or university, you may have encountered the CAPM in your 101 finance course. This post raises awareness of the presence of another market-priced risk factor.

If you are an investor, you may wish to consider increasing your exposure to the quality factor in order to boost your portfolio’s total return.

Related posts on the SimTrade blog

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Minimum Volatility

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Value Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Yield Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Momentum Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Size Factor

   ▶ Youssef LOURAOUI Growth Factor

Useful resources

Academic research

Clifford S. Asness & Andrea Frazzini & Lasse Heje Pedersen, 2019. “Quality minus junk,” Review of Accounting Studies, 24(1): 34-112.

Hasaj, M., Sherer, B., 2021. Covid-19 and Smart-Beta: A Case Study on the Role of Sectors. EDHEC-Risk Institute Working paper, 1-35.

Mangram, M.E., 2013. A simplified perspective of the Markowitz Portfolio Theory. Global Journal of Business Research, 7(1): 59-70.

Pagano, M., Wagner, C., Zechner, J., 2020. Disaster Resilience and Asset Prices, Working paper.

Business analysis

etf.com, 2021. Biggest Quality ETF providers.

MSCI Investment Research, 2021. Factor Focus: Quality.

About the author

The article was written in September 2021 by Youssef LOURAOUI (ESSEC Business School, Global Bachelor of Business Administration, 2017-2021).