The Value Of Price Targets

Abstract

We analyze the difference in ROIC (Return on Invested Capital) for the portion of client portfolios with price targets and the portion of client portfolios without price targets. In examining exposures, we find a long bias in the portion of the portfolio with research versus the portion of the portfolio without research making the Total measurements less meaningful. To neutralize this distortion, we look at differences on a long and short basis. We find that the portfolios with price targets outperform by 16% on an annualized ROIC basis (average of long and short improvement).

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We also look at optimal position sizing suggested by the Alpha Theory algorithm and find that optimizing position sizes that have price targets adds an additional 5% for long positions.
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Data

Alpha Theory tracks investment results for clients on a daily basis. We’re able to segment the daily returns for portfolios into two categories, securities with price targets and securities with no price targets. We’re then able to calculate an average daily return across our client base, segmenting into these two categories. All of our calculations are done on an ROIC basis for comparability purposes. Removing the exposure effect would result in returns of a portfolio that is 100% allocated to either category. For comparison, we also calculate returns based on optimal position sizing recommendations as well as returns on the ACWI, an all-world index.

Research

Figure 1 shows the cumulative returns over the time for the period of the analysis, where we break out client portfolios by the portion with and without price targets. We also look at how the optimal portfolio would have performed, which is a portfolio composed of securities with optimal position sizing output from Alpha Theory. Alpha Theory uses price target inputs to recommend position sizing based on probability-weighted return calculated from those price targets. Alpha Theory does not recommend position sizing on securities without research, so the comparison would be best made between optimal returns and the portion of the portfolio with price targets. We find that the portion of the portfolio with no price targets significantly underperforms the price target portfolio, by 11.5% on an annualized basis.  What we also see is that the price target portfolio, if sized optimally (where not already done so), would have increased performance even further, by 3.3%. Decomposing the exposures on the price target and non-price target portfolio reveals that the average net exposure for the price target portfolio is 40% and the average net exposure on the non-price target portfolio is -12%. This is an interesting divergence, as it tells us that managers are more likely to initiate a short position without research than a long position without research. With the non-price target portion running such a low net exposure, we would expect average returns to be roughly zero, as longs and shorts balance each other over a large sample. A clearer picture would be one where we break out the long and short portions.

Figure 2 shows the same data for the long portion of the portfolio. We find that the long price target portfolio outperforms the long non-price target portfolio by 3.4% on an annualized basis. Sizing optimally (where not already done so) adds an additional 1.0% to the annualized return.

We then look at the same data for the short portfolio in Figure 3. We find that the price target portfolio outperforms by 0.9%, on an annualized basis. Sizing optimally (where not already done so) would have added an additional 3.2%.

Conclusion

Our assumption for why securities with price targets outperform those without is that price targets inform investors of value, make explicit the logic around their decisions, allow for optimal position sizing to be calculated and have a higher level of research rigor.

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Investing in assets without first calculating price targets is deleterious to returns. This result is intuitive to most managers but hopefully this gives empirical evidence that will prevent future positions going into the portfolio without the critical step of defining risk-reward.