- Relentless ROEs?
- Economic Gravity Reigns Supreme
- ROEs Reconsidered
- High and Low ROE Companies Experience Meaningful Reversion
Introduction: Relentless ROEs?
As avid consumers of a wide variety of investment material, we have to admit that certain firms have demonstrated such proficiency at lucid commentary they have become in-house favorites. In some cases, the writing has such a profound impact that we find ourselves entangled in visceral debates post publication, vexing our wonderful programmers with follow-up questions seeking further clarification or insight. In our opinion, Grantham Mayo (GMO) is one of these firms, kindly offering some of the most erudite market commentary in the industry. Their recent white paper, Profits for the Long Run: Affirming the Case for Quality by Chuck Joyce and Kimball Mayer, proved to be no exception.
The authors offer readers a wonderful roadmap that helps explain how fundamental constructs can effectively be brought to bear on the highly topical item of “low-risk investing.” We strongly recommend the white paper as the work is loaded with exceptional insights into the intersection of volatility, fundamentals and returns. What created a collective brain stall in our group however, was the powerful analysis on the persistence of high and low ROE companies. Effectively GMO manages to show that companies with the highest (lowest) ROEs five years ago displayed persistently higher (lower) ROEs on a current basis.
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GMO took its universe of stocks, broke it into quartiles based on ROEs and then plotted the five-year forward ROEs of the highest and lowest quartiles over time. Although our methodology differs slightly, we ran a similar exercise on our all but micro (ABM) universe of stocks2 and found results that confirmed what GMO showed: those companies that were more (less) profitable five years ago based on ROE seem to remain in their respective economic stations into the future as shown in Fig. 1. Coming from avid believers in mean reversion, this chart carried an unsettling message (to us anyway) by questioning what we see as the laws of economic gravity. With elevated valuations having soared higher through 2022, these concepts are critical to understand prior to investing in a bear market that many believe is looming.
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July 18, 2012 |
| Authors: Matthew Malgari, Nathan Przybylo, Dr. Sanjeev Bhojraj and John Durkin
July 18, 2012
Authors: Matthew Malgari, Nathan Przybylo, Dr. Sanjeev Bhojraj and John Durkin