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KISS, Or How To Make Money By Following Your Research
Successful traders and investors encourage entrants to the field to find an “edge”, ideally a strategy that has not already been widely adopted by other market participants. Our research suggests that it is more important to focus on the fundamentals. Learn more here.
“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
- Charlie Munger
Successful traders and investors encourage entrants to the field to find an “edge”, ideally a strategy that has not already been widely adopted by other market participants. This has led to the proliferation of esoteric strategies, especially in the quantitative arena. In order to generate alpha in the increasingly competitive asset management industry, you need an army of PhD’s, complex strategies, and troves of data, right? Well, not necessarily.
Analysis of the Alpha Theory dataset shows that if managers simply exit all positions where probability-weighted return is zero or negative, the average manager’s CAGR would improve by 3%!
Alpha Theory managers create a probability-weighted value for each position based on price targets and probabilities for the various scenarios which may play out in the market. In an ideal long scenario, the current market price of a security will increase towards the probability-weighted value. As price and expected value converge, probability-weighted return drops to zero, and the analyst should either revise price targets upward, trim, or exit the position all together. If expected return is zero, Optimal Position Size will recommend exiting the position, as there are other investments with greater expected return.
Sometimes, however, managers are slow to update price targets, or to reallocate the portfolio to higher expected return investments. We compared the return on invested capital (ROIC or total return/gross exposure) of the manager’s actual portfolios to what ROIC would have been if managers were only invested in positive probability-weighted return positions. This means a long position would only be in the portfolio if the probability-weighted return was positive, and a short position only if the probability-weighted return was negative.
The data below shows the improvement in ROIC over actual for simply removing positions with negative probability-weighted returns (blue column) and then for Alpha Theory’s Optimal Position Size (gray column), which layers on additional sizing logic in addition to zeroing out positions with zero probability-weighted return. The sample includes all Alpha Theory clients from January 1st, 2014 to June 30th, 2021.
Returns on manager portfolios of only the positions which had a directionally accurate positive probability-weighted return had a 3% higher CAGR, and returns on Optimal Position Size, which uses manager research as well as other portfolio constraints, improved CAGR by 6.7% over actual ROIC.
Highly intelligent, sophisticated investors look for ways to improve by default, and the temptation to distinguish oneself with new strategies is intense. But our research suggests that it is more important to focus on the fundamentals. John Wooden’s insight that free throws contribute to national championships also applies to portfolio management. Having high research coverage, updating price targets, and being allocated to positive returns are simple rules which contribute to outperformance, but which are often ignored at the expense of alpha.
