Most global indices ended the month in the red. The US Dollar rallied against most major currencies and the market seems to have come to terms with a December liftoff in US interest rates.
Most investment strategies did well… November saw Quality to Price post over +250% and Momentum post over +200% gains since their inception in August 2013.
In a wide ranging interview with Tyler Cowen, Cliff Asness discussed momentum and value investing strategies, disagreeing with Eugene Fama, the economics of Ayn Rand, bubble logic etc. The first half of the conversation was mostly about momentum investing and how it works.
Excepts on momentum:
Intro
A momentum investing strategy is the rather insane proposition that you can buy a portfolio of what’s been going up for the last 6 to 12 months, sell a portfolio of what’s been going down for the last 6 to 12 months, and you beat the market. Unfortunately for sanity, that seems to be true.
To some, it’s very intuitive. Just buy what’s going up.
Drawdowns
It has horrible streaks within that of not working. If your car worked like this, you’d fire your mechanic, if it worked like I use that word. I think it is harder than you might guess, even if something works long term, to have it go away because a lot of investors can’t live through the bad periods. They decide why it’s never going to work again at the wrong time.
Why it works
Underreation: News comes out. Price moves but not all the way. People update their priors but not fully efficiently. Therefore, just observing the price move is not going to move the same amount again but there’s some statistical tendency to continue.
Overreaction: People in fact do chase prices.
How to make it work
If you’re going to be momentum, you’ve got to really do it. You’ve got to be disciplined. You’ve got to come in every day, and you’ve got to count on these under- and overreaction things.
Momentum strategies on StockViz
We have been offering the Momentum Theme for more than two years now. It implements a relative momentum strategy where you compare the strengths of a universe of stocks to each other. 2014 returns were +90% and +36% so far this year (Compare.)
This year, we have introduced Velocity – an absolute momentum strategy – and Acceleration – a strategy that tracks changes in momentum.
If you are interested in momentum investing, please get in touch with us!
It was a good week for the markets over all. Risk was firmly ON and most markets rallied. The market is expecting a US Fed December liftoff. The USD continued to rally against other major currencies, European bonds dipped in negative-yield territory on rumors of more ECB QE and oil dipped bellow $40 a barrel.
Force yourself to relive the anxiety and worry of being down 5% and wondering if 20% is coming next. Remember what it was like to worry that war might break out or disease was spreading or economic collapse was around the corner. Not because this alone is a good practice, but because it is going to happen again, and sooner than you think. It happens every year like clockwork. You can’t pick a time in history that something scary wasn’t around the corner. You need to hold on to those past moment and then recognize that even though it was truly scary life moved on and markets recovered and the world didn’t, in fact, come to an end.
A recent paper in the Financial Analysts Journal looks at the Turn of the Month effect on equities. Equity Returns at the Turn of the Month, John J. McConnell and Wei Xu:
The turn-of-the-month effect in U.S. equities is found to be so powerful in the 1926–2005 period that, on average, investors received no reward for bearing market risk except at turns of the month. The effect is not confined to small-capitalization or low-price stocks, to calendar year-ends or quarter ends, or to the United States: This study finds that it occurs in 31 of the 35 countries examined. Furthermore, it is not caused by month-end buying pressure as measured by trading volume or net flows to equity funds. This persistent peculiarity in returns remains a puzzle in search of an answer.
Does it apply to Indian markets?
The study skips over the Indian markets. So we did a quick test on the CNX 100 index to check if the effect holds. Here’s the cumulative return chart between a Buy-and-Hold CNX 100 strategy (B&H, black) and a Turn-of-the-Month CNX 100 strategy (TOM, red):
Although the TOM strategy has lower-drawdowns, the B&H wins – both in terms of tax advantage and trading costs. The Turn-of-the-Month effect doesn’t seem to apply to Indian equities.