Stock Selection and Analysis - Articles & White Papers

Growth opportunities are plentiful in emerging markets thanks to strong secular tailwinds — but they are company-specific. Identifying strong growers within a changing opportunity set is key to unlocking the potential of this asset class, suggests Jennison Associates.

*Some or all of the companies mentioned…

Adam Berger, CFA, Wellington's Multi-Asset Strategist, updates his thinking on the COVID pandemic, inflation prospects, and provides a road map for portfolio responses.

The question of ‘concentrated ownership’ has gained importance as a few large, passively managed vehicles such as Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) hold a greater share of many highly traded securities. There is clearly a new type of nonfundamental risk premium emerging because of this growing concentration. With the growing…

How can investors capture the most important opportunities of the next decade? Thematic investing places structural change at the heart of a long-term equity portfolio and, in Lazard AM's view, can enhance returns, mitigate risks, and enable sustainability integration. It is time to change how we think about equity portfolio…

The evidence that most active portfolio managers typically underperform passive benchmarks appropriate to their investment style is extensive — both historically and geographically. This paper asks a simple question: what (if anything) distinguishes the three years when most active managers outperformed from the 16 years…

The 2018-2020 quant equity crisis posed an exceptional challenge to quantitative managers due to a rare combination of circumstances. There was basically only one way to outperform during this period, investing in the largest and most expensive growth stocks. Meanwhile, established factors were only effective to the extent…

In this report, RBC GAM highlights the extreme underperformance of Value stocks versus Growth stocks in emerging and developed markets (EM & DM) over the past decade. They summarise the key reasons for the poor performance before discussing why they believe the environment for Value should improve in coming years.

This book represents a selection of the working papers and discussion papers which seem the most representative of Amundi's work over the past 12 months. A vast array of work is included, encompasssing most aspects of investment management.

In this global investment outlook, Franklin Templeton's investment professionals across asset classes share how they’re thinking about portfolios amid continued market uncertainty.

Value stocks have severely underperformed in recent years, leading many investors to question the relevance of value investing or even to contemplate its demise. However, in this paper the authors show that the spreads between the valuations of value stocks compared with those of the most expensive stocks has been expanding…

The positive market performance broadly translated into good absolute returns for active fund managers. While the turmoil and disruption caused by the pandemic should have offered numerous opportunities for outperformance, 57% of domestic equity funds lagged the S&P Composite1500 during the one-year period ending Dec. 31…

QMA use a new approach to explore a link between the well-known macroeconomic exposures of traditional asset classes and those of value premia in a multi-asset context.

Momentum had its ‘shot of momentum’ in 2020. But the ride was a bumpy one, while investors also saw large return dispersions between different Momentum approaches. In this article, Robeco examines the drivers behind the strong performance delivered by Momentum, how the factor can at times be exposed to significant style and…

Institutional investors often pose the question of how factors perform across economic cycles. The concept of a normalised cycle has come under pressure in the post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) era that has seen sustained quantitative easing, financial repression and lower trend growth. Consequently, this has necessitated a…

EDHEC-Risk Institute investigate the role of sectors on the performance of smart-beta products during the COVID-19 crisis. Cross sectional differences in excess returns (versus a market capitalized portfolio) are driven by strong exposures to a historically unique COVID-19 related industry rotation, rather than to long term…

The unique nature of the current crisis raises several questions about its longer-term implications. For example, will the eventual distribution of a vaccine and an end to lockdowns reduce the momentum of these trends? Perhaps, but it is our view that the pandemic has unleashed secular forces that had been restrained by…

Institutional investors are often faced with the question of which factor strategies should be implemented in different phases of the economic cycle. In this paper, FTSE Russell examines how factors behave across economic cycles for the US market.

Interest in socially responsible investing continues to gain ground as climate change and social issues have become increasingly prioritized by stakeholders. MIM believes a larger focus on passive management, significant interest from institutional investors, and increasing regulatory scrutiny on both corporations and…

Wells Fargo AM take a look at the reasons behind the slump in the US integrated energy sector and argue forcefully that investors should reconsider the sector particularly as it adapts strategies to cope with a decarbonizing economy.

Why it might not make sense to invest in well-run companies: a deep dive into the Quality factor asks whether growth at any price has changed investing forever.