Remember how difficult it was to plan a vacation? We used to spend hours on the phone with a travel agent, then wait days, if not weeks, for them to complete their task. And that magic came with a hefty price tag, as only travel agents had access to the crucial information needed to plan our holiday.
However, information that was previously solely available to travel brokers is now available to everybody — and in a matter of seconds. Finding the ideal hotel has become easier, faster, and less expensive thanks to travel websites.
The same is true when it comes to investing. Active managers have deployed teams of analysts to uncover stocks that appear to have a higher chance of outperforming for years. And you had to pay a lot of money as an investment to get access to that thinking.
Many of the characteristics sought by active managers (such as buying undervalued, high-quality companies) are referred to as factors. And, just as you don’t need to call a travel agent to book a low-cost, high-quality vacation, you don’t need to pay high fees to active managers to pick the best stocks based on criteria.
You can now invest in stocks that display the variables that have historically drove portfolio returns using iShares Factor ETFs.
Factor investing provides access to security screens that active managers have used for years, just as travel sites employ simple filters to swiftly dig down to the appropriate hotel. Investment ideas that once took a team of analysts months to study now take a fraction of the time and expense thanks to data and technology.
There are five factors that have historically been demonstrated to be return drivers, and iShares offers ETFs that attempt to capture all five:
There’s also Quality, which identifies businesses with robust and healthy financial statements. Stocks with low volatility, or stocks that are less volatile than the market as a whole. Size, which is aimed at smaller, more agile businesses. Momentum is a strategy that looks for stocks that are on the rise. And there’s value, which looks for stocks that are undervalued based on their fundamentals.
Factor ETFs give average investors access to the strength of time-tested investment screens in a low-cost, tax-efficient investment vehicle.
Who said it was difficult to find the correct stocks for your portfolio? It’s as simple as booking a hotel, we claim.
What is a value factor ETF, exactly?
The iShares MSCI USA Value Factor ETF aims to replicate the performance of an index made up of large- and mid-capitalization equities in the United States with value characteristics and lower valuations.
What are the five factors to consider when investing?
Professor Elroy Dimson of Cambridge Judge Business examines five key factors that all investors should keep an eye on as factor investing and smart beta methods become more popular.
These methods aim to profit from long-term premiums identified by academic researchers who look beyond typical asset classes or indexes to build a portfolio around more particular or granular “factors.”
According to the article, “Factor-based investing: the long-term evidence,” nearly three-quarters of asset owners are using or actively evaluating smart beta strategies, and the use of smart beta indexes is rapidly increasing, according to Professor Dimson and his article co-authors, Professor Paul Marsh and Dr Mike Staunton of London Business School.
While academics have discovered over 300 elements that may fit into such methods (though most would fail independent testing of their long-term performance), there are five main factors to which all investors are exposed — deliberately or unknowingly: size, value, yield, momentum, and risk.
Professor Dimson’s essay was published in a special issue of the Journal of Portfolio Management devoted to various aspects of factor investing. Professor Stephen A. Ross of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who sadly passed away in March 2017, wrote an introductory editorial remark on the “Theory, Statistics, and Practice” of factor investing for the issue.
Professor Dimson presents the research background surrounding five smart beta factors that investors should keep an eye on, based on an article published in the Journal of Portfolio Management:
Size
Smaller listed firms have generated the strongest long-term returns, according to research spanning six decades in the United Kingdom (and much longer in the United States). Despite the fact that the advantage of small-capitalization enterprises has been uneven and intermittent, small caps have outperformed large caps in the long run.
£1 invested in UK large caps in 1955 would have risen to £1,087 by the end of 2016, representing a 12 percent annualized return. The identical investment would have earned £3,220 for mid caps, £6,861 for small caps, and £27,256 for micro caps over the same time period.
Value
In markets like the United States and the United Kingdom, investing in value companies has paid off handsomely over time. Value companies are those that trade for low multiples of earnings or book value, and while they may have experienced failures or be mature and uninteresting firms, substantial research in many nations demonstrates that their long-term performance has been far superior to growth stocks. In the UK, a £1 investment in the growth index in 1955 would have yielded £419 in annualised returns by the end of 2016, whereas the same £1 invested in the value index would have generated £9,173 or more than 21 times as much by the end of 2016.
However, there have been some particularly dismal periods for value stocks, including much of the 1990s and again after 2007, and there is ongoing dispute over whether value investing’s historical overall advantage over recent decades should be expected to continue.
What exactly is a factor fund?
What are “factor based” funds, and how do they work? Factor-based funds are an active management strategy. They have the potential to meet specific risk and return objectives by “tilting” portfolios toward certain stock characteristics, such as recent momentum, greater quality, or lower stock prices, on purpose and openly.
Are ETFs preferable to stocks?
Consider the risk as well as the potential return when determining whether to invest in stocks or an ETF. When there is a broad dispersion of returns from the mean, stock-picking has an advantage over ETFs. And, with stock-picking, you can use your understanding of the industry or the stock to gain an advantage.
In two cases, ETFs have an edge over stocks. First, an ETF may be the best option when the return from equities in the sector has a tight dispersion around the mean. Second, if you can’t obtain an advantage through company knowledge, an ETF is the greatest option.
To grasp the core investment fundamentals, whether you’re picking equities or an ETF, you need to stay current on the sector or the stock. You don’t want all of your hard work to be undone as time goes on. While it’s critical to conduct research before selecting a stock or ETF, it’s equally critical to conduct research and select the broker that best matches your needs.
What ETFs should I include in my investment portfolio?
The majority of financial advisors advise investing a portion of your portfolio in fixed-income products like bonds and bond ETFs. This is due to the fact that bonds tend to lower portfolio volatility while also offering a source of additional income. The age-old question is reduced to a calculation of percentages. What percentage of your portfolio should be invested in equities, fixed income, and cash? Asset allocation is the term used to describe this process. Bond funds, like equity funds, come in a variety of options. Total bond-market ETFs, which invest in the entire US bond market, are a good option for investors who aren’t sure what type to buy.
So, what exactly is a factor strategy?
Factor investing is a strategy for selecting assets based on characteristics linked to greater returns. Macroeconomic factors and style factors are the two main categories of factors that have influenced stock, bond, and other asset returns. The former seeks to explain returns and risks within asset classes, whereas the latter aims to capture broad concerns across asset classes.
The rate of inflation, GDP growth, and the unemployment rate are all common macroeconomic parameters. Creditworthiness of a corporation, share liquidity, and stock price volatility are all microeconomic elements to consider. Growth versus value stocks, market capitalization, and industrial sector are all style considerations.
What are size-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs)?
The idea behind a factor ETF is that by moving away from traditional indexes, you can diversify your portfolio “Using “plain vanilla” trackers, one can increase the rate of return and/or reduce risk without having to engage in costly and time-consuming stock choosing. The term “bias” or “tilt” refers to this movement. In other words, these products are not pure trackers; they stray from merely rising and falling with the market to some extent.
Each iShares ETF has a distinct focus: one is geared toward small businesses, another is geared toward companies whose stock prices are rising or gaining momentum, and a third is geared toward companies whose stock prices are undervalued by the market.
The iShares size factor ETF focuses on large- and mid-capitalization stocks in the United States “with relatively smaller market capitalization,” with the concept that smaller companies are often overlooked. The momentum factor ETF invests in equities that are increasing in price and volume, whereas the value factor ETF weights shares based on four accounting criteria and compares them to the parent index.
These are the three methods “Tilt” the fund away from the index you want to track. All of these types of bias make financial sense, and if properly set, they should produce a successful quasi-tracker that outperforms a pure buying-the-market vehicle.
Is the size of an ETF important?
When comparing similar ETFs, the rule of thumb is that bigger is better. Larger ETFs can take advantage of economies of scale to reduce expenses and are less likely to be liquidated, which can negatively impact your returns. To be viable, ETFs must grow to a certain size.
What is the investment quality factor?
The quality factor refers to the tendency of high-quality stocks to outperform low-quality stocks over a long time horizon, with more consistent earnings, better balance sheets, and larger margins.
The outperformance of high-quality stocks over low-quality equities has been widely proven in the financial literature, however the definition of “quality” is debatable. Earnings, dividend payments, and debt levels have all been demonstrated to have as much explanatory power as the value component in connection to a stock’s performance.
Quality-based strategies seek to profit from the premium associated with high-quality equities over low-quality stocks. However, of all the risk variables, this is possibly the most difficult to quantify, as investors disagree on the best method for determining quality.
Quality might signify gross profitability, return on invested capital, growth, earnings stability, high payout rates, or minimal volatility and fundamental risk, depending on the investment manager. Regardless of the statistic, quality-oriented strategies often outperform the market because they are better prepared to weather economic downturns.
For factor investors and academics alike, the quality factor remains a mystery, as higher-quality equities should, on the surface, be more expensive. The fact that quality isn’t completely priced into the stock, either due to insufficient risk models or behavioural biases, could explain the premia’s existence.