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At the start of October, the FTSE All-Share fell by nearly 7% in a week. Good companies are still cheaper than they were.
But how best to find them?
October 2018 was a story of fear overcoming greed, with investors haunted by the spectre of a bear market. Very appropriate for Halloween. We have built up a loose body of commentary over the past couple of weeks, when not hiding under the bedsheets. Once the dust settles we can forget how things felt in the heat of the moment, so it’s helpful to have a record showing that, ah, yes, at one point, some of us - maybe - were a tad concerned.
Acknowledging these things, while not flattering to the ego, can better prepare us for the future. It will happen again, after all. Here are some of the articles and comments (from most recent to oldest):
Thursday 25th October: How falling markets present tough questions to investors
Friday 19th October: Stable stock ideas for volatile markets
Anyway, back to identifying those investment opportunities. We need to narrow the field. One method of investing comes to mind.
There is a growing body of academic work that supports the ‘low volatility anomaly’
It shows that low-volatility stocks tend to have higher returns per unit of risk than higher-volatility stocks
This begs the question: are we better off being boring?
There is a method of investing out there that has been used by some of the best fund managers in the world. Its successful application used to require many man-hours and entire teams of investment professionals due to its quantitative nature and the calculations involved. We have set up our own easy-to-use take on it that and, so far, as we see below, it has yielded encouraging results.
I’m talking about the low volatility anomaly. There is a growing body of academic studies that proves it works - here are a few of the more influential articles:
“Low Risk Stocks Outperform within All Observable Markets of the World¹” by Baker & Haugen.
“The Volatility Effect: Lower Risk without Lower Return” by Blitz and van Vliet.
“The Cross Section of Volatility and Expected Returns” by Ang, Hedrick, Xing and Zhang.
“Betting against Beta” by Frazzini and Pedersen
The argument in a nutshell: lower volatility securities tend to outperform higher volatility securities after taking into account how much risk is required to produce those returns.
In their influential paper, The Volatility Effect (2007), David Blitz and Pim van Vliet find that ‘low-risk stocks exhibit significantly higher risk-adjusted returns than the market portfolio, while high-risk stocks significantly underperform on a risk-adjusted basis.’
Blitz and van Vliet found that volatile stocks outperformed in up months (when markets rose) ‘but not by enough to offset the underperformance during down months.’ Meanwhile, low-risk portfolios’ underperformance during up market months was ‘considerably less than outperformance during down months.’ This effect is partially countered in the study by the more frequent occurrence of up months (59% up compared to 41% down months).
Ang et al. also found in their 2006 study that U.S. stocks with high volatility earned disappointing returns over the 1963-2000 period. It’s worth noting that this study used a one-month volatility measure as opposed to three-year.
Stockopedia’s RiskRatings allow investors to instantly gauge the volatility of a company
The system is split into five categories (Conservative, Balanced, Adventurous, Speculative, Highly Speculative)
Stocks are assigned a RiskRating according to their annualised volatility
This might be a superior way of identifying defensive stocks than by sector, size or beta
The RiskRatings classification system groups companies according to annualised share price volatility. It makes Stockopedia crunch the numbers so we don’t have to. It is geared towards identifying stable stocks and exploiting the low volatility anomaly and is calculated as a measure of volatility based on the standard deviation of three year daily price returns (adjusted for autocorrelation and sample size).
For more on the subject, the team has written a 20-page ebook on the system as well as this article, here.
The resulting groups end up being sorted like this:
By screening for RiskRatings, we can see how low volatility stocks have performed over the past six months. We want to see if investing in Conservative and Balanced stocks might lead to long-term success regardless of market conditions.
To test how well the RiskRatings have held up over the past month or so, we downloaded the share price performances of all the stocks across all the Ratings, checked their volatility, and measured their performances against the FTSE All-Share over the past six months.
We took their betas and 1-year volatility measures to see what they told us as well. Here are the results, with some bullet point findings and a couple of pretty pictures.
This table shows that RiskRatings appear to have worked over the past six months but Conservative was the only group to outperform the All-Share
On a six month view we see that:
Conservative stocks outperformed the FTSE All-Share by 4.89%. All other categories and stocks underperformed
Balanced stocks lagged by 1.19%
Adventurous lagged by 4.74%
Speculative lagged by 4.69%
Highly Speculative lagged by some 8.14%
Furthermore, returns are much more consistent for Conservative stocks than with other classes. We can see this in the standard deviation data:
The win rate is just what I’ve called the percentage of stocks that performed better than the benchmark (ie. > -6.41%) in each bucket
Conservative is the only class to have a win rate of more than 50%
Statistically speaking, if you picked a stock from any class other than Conservative, chances are it would have underperformed the All-Share
Median 1-year volatility decreases as the classifications become safer. This makes sense, considering how the Ratings are calculated
As you might expect, the chart looks a lot like the standard deviation chart above:
The QualityRank and StockRank increases for safer stocks, with a step-change between Speculative and Adventurous followed by a plateau
This suggests that a safer RiskRating is more likely to have a higher QualityRank, a higher StockRank, and lower volatility
However, the bar chart below highlights that StockRanks alone do not capture the low volatility anomaly:
Conservative, Balanced, and Adventurous RiskRatings all have similar Quality and StockRanks:
Yet, as we see in the chart below, performances over the six-month period vary:
This suggests that looking at high StockRank Conservative stocks might make all the difference
The median beta measures are much less informative
Standard deviation of beta increases dramatically for Speculative and Highly Speculative stocks
This means inferior RiskRatings contain a broad range of betas, raising questions about its ability to describe risk
One final point is that the RiskRatings are a great way to approach StockRanks from a slightly different angle. You can see in the graphic below just how pronounced the difference in overall quality is between Conservative and Highly Speculative - and we get this result purely by analysing volatility:
A full quarter of Conservative stocks are High Flyers. Low volatility high flying shares sound like a good fit for the low volatility anomaly theory. Another 15% are super stocks - the highest of any of the Ratings and a total of 46.6% of the classification is green vs. 9.9% red.
More than 50% of all red stocks are classified as Highly Speculative, as are the majority of Sucker Stocks. If we exclude Highly Speculative stocks from our universe, we avoid 54.8% of Sucker Stocks, Value Traps, Momentum Traps, and Falling Stars. When picking stocks at the most volatile end of the market, we have much less chance of selecting a Super Stock, Turnaround, Contrarian, or High Flyer.
Successful, balanced portfolios can have a variety of investments with distinctive characteristics. Growing small-caps can bring positive momentum and multi-bagging returns but are often risky. Deep-value stocks tend to come with a quantifiable margin of safety but they can also remain at depressed valuations for years.
It can be prudent to have a core part of the portfolio allocated to high quality, defensive, stable companies. Filtering by RiskRating might well be the best way to screen for this type of investment.
If you want to follow this up with any screens or studies of your own, it’s very simple to set up. Here’s how I did this one:
Go to ‘Screens’ drop-down box in the toolbar and select ‘Create a Screen’ on the right
‘X’ off the starting box and click ‘Add New Rule’, then click on ‘Style / Risk / Size’
Select ‘RiskRating’, ‘Includes’, and type in or pick ‘Conservative’ (or whichever class you would like to screen for)
We excluded the following financial industries and venture capital trusts to make the data series more meaningful
To do this: ‘Add New Rule’
‘Sectors / Indices’, ‘Excludes’, and type in ‘Banking Services’, ‘Investment Banking & Investment Services’, ‘Residential & Commercial REITS’, and ‘Collective Investments’
Once this is done, click on the pencil graphic to the right of ‘Overview’ at the top of the new screen to access the Table Editor and add the following:
Repeat this screen for Balanced, Adventurous, Speculative, and Highly Speculative stocks.
And that’s the test, more or less. We also excluded stocks with a market cap of less than £10m. There are many other inputs that could generate more insights into this system. Feel free to rummage around.
If you’re anything like me, holding low-volatility stocks can be surprisingly hard to do. I get bored and then find the next big thing. Then I convince myself that I must act on said big thing or else I will forever regret it. Don’t blame me, blame my neural wiring.
If I get it right I'm a genius.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to get it right. And sometimes when I do get it right, I’ve already moved on to the next big thing months before what’s supposed to happen actually happens. Picture a dog chasing cars, excited by all the horse-powered engines and honking horns.
There is plenty of research out there that suggests we are our own worst enemies when it comes to investing. Sometimes the best move is to buy good companies at good prices and then do nothing at all for quite a long time. Simple, but not easy.
This reminds me of ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman. The book does a thorough job of highlighting the blind spots and biases that affect our behaviour in pretty much all walks of life - not just investing. If you assume that these behavioural heuristics don’t apply to you, maybe you have an overconfidence bias…
Screening for stocks with certain characteristics makes for a more disciplined investor. For those seeking out quality long-term holdings, including RiskRatings in those screens might help cut through the noise.
About Jack Brumby
I'm looking for compounding investments.
I started off in Leisure - a part of the market I still love, but an area where stocks can appear "cheap" for years without going anywhere. It made me realise that valuation is only one part of the puzzle.
Now I sift through a much broader universe of stocks in search of small, high quality operators with large addressable markets, strong and maintainable margins, and clear share price catalysts.
CFA charterholder.
Disclaimer - This is not financial advice. Our content is intended to be used and must be used for information and education purposes only. Please read our disclaimer and terms and conditions to understand our obligations.
But if one can successfully achieve the level of market timing necessary to make your suggested strategy work @dfs12 then why not just move between high vol and cash?
Looking at my own portfolio, I am sure some of the Risk categories of my selected stocks have drifted over time. Now they all labelled adventurous. This is a slippery business, as there is currently no ascribed timeline to any risk status. For example, if you were to screen for this characteristic, wouldn't you want to know how long it had fallen into that category?
Maybe its better to add to this other factors - average yield etc, or maybe screening as screening on one characteristic alone is no to be recommended?
I am a naive investor, and certainly not quant minded, as you may have gathered.
Up to now I have been weeding out stocks that don't fall in the green sector of the bubble charts in Overview.
The 58 qualifying conservative stocks that currently meet your screen rules seem to fill the whole spectrum.
If I add QV, VM and QM filters at >80% then only 5 stocks appear.
I now ask myself which approach is more likely to protect my wealth?
That makes sense Trident - I don't know if you create screens already, but it's easy (and actually quite fun) to play around with them on Stocko as you can let out your inner mad scientist. I focused on RiskRatings here as I wanted to deepen my understanding of the concept, and including other factors in the screen might have dragged me off topic. But for sure, including some other measures to see if you can better tailor a screen to find the stocks you're looking for sounds like a good idea.
The StockRankitself is a composite measure of various ratios so that number contains quite a lot of info about a stock. Have you checked out the O'Shaughnessy book 'What Works on Wall Street'?
Hi goodgoff,
I don't think there's a wrong or right answer to this - not one I could suggest without a lot more data to back it up, anyway.
For protecting wealth, considering good, cheap stocks (the green area of the quality vs. value bubble chart) sounds like a good strategy. As does paying attention to the RiskRatings, which measures how volatile the shares have been on average over a multi-year period.
You could relax the screen slightly. I'm assuming you're looking just in the UK? If you drop the 'VM' and add in 'Balanced' that widens the universe of stocks a little.
If you're not comfortable doing that then don't, though. It depends what your own level of risk tolerance is. I just tried to find a Buffett quote (couldn't) but he's saying something like 'imagine you could only buy 10 stocks in your life' - the point being if I want to be very disciplined and very safe, I might have to bide my time and sit on cash waiting for the right opportunity to come along.
And even with the RiskRatings and StockRanks, it always pays to DYOR - does this company have a strong economic moat? Does it generate strong returns on capital and/or equity? If it pays dividends, does it have a history of sustainable payments with good dividend cover or has it had to stop divis or reduce them before? Has it survived through tough markets before?
I also remind myself that in October a) most stocks were down as, probably, were most investors and, b) share prices can recover (even if the present feels painful) - February 2018 was also quite a steep drop but it seemed like that pain was forgotten as soon stocks recovered heading into the summer.
That turned into a bit of a ramble!
Hi Jack,
Good to have you writing for Stockopedia.
As you say the low volatility 'anomaly' has been known since the days of Haugen and is a significant challenge to the EMH. Haugen proposed that it could be explained as a function of gearing limits on mutual funds combined with the principal-agent problem related to fund manager bonuses. i.e. FM get a bonus above a certain benchmark but doesn't pay it back in down years. Rational FM's with this incentive structure should prefer more volatile stocks even if they bid them up to prices which makes them overvalued, on average. They are in effect using them as an expensive form of gearing in order to maximise their personal expected return.
What truly matters in your analysis is out-of-sample performance. While it's not entirely clear from your article it reads as if you are taking today's RiskRating and looking at the historic 6 month volatility & return. Since the last 6 months have sen a negative FTSE return and the RiskRatings are formed form historic 12 month volatility it is no surprise that you get the results that you do since the formation data is in the sample whose results you are reporting.
What you really need to look at is the 6-month performance of the groups of Riskratings formed 6 months ago. And then as others have pointed out repeat for multiple periods.
I'm not sure you will see a low-volatility strategy outperform full cycle on an absolute basis but I'm pretty sure you will on a volatility adjusted basis, which is still a big positive since you can just gear up to generate absolute out-performance if you want, or without gearing it makes it a lot easier to hold equities full cycle if you reduce the volatility and is worth the sacrifice in absolute performance for most people (who tend to have negative-impact market timing tendencies!)
Mark
Hi Jack,
I think the quote you were looking for is :
An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it.
To me that goes hand in hand with the better known :
Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.
The key message essentially being "don't invest unless you are absolutely sure."
In my view though that is very poor investment advice for the majority of investors and in fact it doesn't align very well with other things Buffett has said, such as :
We’ve made lots of mistakes, but they don’t bother me. We’ve had no regrets. We are in the business of making many decisions and there are bound to be mistakes.Everyone is different of course, but for me trying to make a very small number of investments all of which must be correct is just way too much pressure in many ways and can in fact lead to worse not better decision making.
One of the eye openers for me (or at least reinforcement of something I probably knew anyway) from using Stockopedia is the realisation that if I can distil down my investment universe to a high quality galaxy, then I'll find enough planets rich in dilithium crystalsto make up for the dusters.
I certainly don't set out to make dumb investment decisions (and in fact do focus a lot on avoiding them), but I very much like not having to make genius investment decisions that always have to be right.
Live long and prosper!
An interesting article although, as others have pointed out, any analysis of data should use prospective rather than historic data. It is actually very easy to see how the SR and its different composites and components have performed recently as the markets have gone backwards using the Ranks Performance tool by just limiting it to the past 3 months. Value seemed to perform best looking at 50m+ companies UK?EU and I was surprised how well momentum held up. But there was no magic bullet. It would be interesting if Stocko would enhance the Rank performance tool to also allow slicing and dicing by Risk Rating and Style as well to facilitate the types of analysis that you have been doing.
A very easy way to construct a well-diversified low volatility portfolio would be to buy an ETF such as this one, which invests globally in stocks exhibiting the "low volatility" factor:
https://www.ishares.com/uk/individual/en/products/251382/ishares-msci-world-minimum-volatility-ucits-etf#/
It has performed reasonably well over the past 5 years, albeit during a mainly bull market, but not as well over the past 3 years as its corresponding global "momentum factor" ETF:
https://www.ishares.com/uk/individual/en/products/270051/ishares-msci-world-momentum-factor-ucits-etf
The following web articles suggest that buying both a low-volatility factor ETF and a momentum factor ETF, with occasional rebalancing between them, would provide good long-term performance with lowish volatility, because low-volatility stocks often move in the opposite direction to momentum stocks during bear market periods:
http://www.fortunefinancialadvisors.com/blog/the-case-for-a-low-volatility-momentum-barbell
http://www.fortunefinancialadvisors.com/blog/a-min-vol-momentum-barbell-for-overseas-markets
Funnily enough I was just thinking about this myself. The momentum strategy is high beta and so it does well when the market is bullish and the low volatility strategy is low beta and is better in a downturn.
But the argument against is that the market volatility should already be the the lowest volatility per unit of return solution already, and in the graphs it does look as if the combination more-or-less cancels out.
Haha thanks Gromley, I feel like I've just watched a sci-fi film. Made me chuckle! A toast to planets rich in dilithium crystals.
I generally agree about the Buffett quote (thanks for locating it btw) in that it is an unrealistic extreme. I wouldn't take it literally and hopefully others don't. It does pop into my head from time-to-time as more of a fable when I'm on the fence about making an investment though.
I'm trying to be mindful of people with different time horizons and risk tolerances, as well. Eg. if you are going to invest for 3-5 years max and your priority is just to not lose money, then simply parking your cash in the bank might not be such a bad thing. Obviously this won't apply for the majority of investors as you say.
See you around!
Hi Mark,
Thanks!
I take your point about out-of-sample data and the potential for hindsight bias. Others have raised it as well and I'm definitely taking it on board for studies in future. Volatility is a big theme and it's not going to go away, so we are definitely going to keep coming back to it. This should give us the opportunity to improve and refine the way we can look at it.
'negative-impact market timing tendencies' - that's a nice way of describing those moments of folly we all know and love!
This article was a lot of fun so I'd like to! At the very least, I think we will try to release more content on the RiskRatings as volatility is such a big theme to cover. Regular periodic coverage could be a good way to do it...
Personally I think using volatility as a measure of risk is not the best approach. It does have some use as miners are volatile and are high risk.
But Amazon is surely lower risk than say a bricks and mortar retailer. But with Amazon a highly rated growth company its shares have been volatile. The trouble with using volatility is that it penalizes companies that have more of their earnings value in the future. But these can be some of the best long-term investments.
You are also relying on other investors to identify risky stocks for you i.e. through the volatility. Then you are assuming that risk can be forecast. The whole point of risk most of the time is that we don't see it coming.
I don't think it is rocket science to say which companies are risky on the basis of what they do and some financial metrics. Some companies with low volatility can blow up in short measure.
Hi Jack,
Yes volatility is one of the most important topics in investing, and there are some big questions such as, to what extent does it represent risk to an investor? How persistent is volatility? How does it relate to other risk or behavioural factors? Stockopedia should increasing start to have the data sets available to start to answer these questions so I look forward to your future research in this area.
Generally in-sample data for a result that isn't used in your formation data set may be ok, although any positive results could be due to data mining and following up with out of sample data is usually best to try to rule that out. The big issue here is that your result (lower 6-month volatility) is actually part of your formation data set (1-year volatility.) It is much more important to think through the independence of formation & result sets, particularly since many investing metrics rely on the same accounting or price data, rather than just shift to out-of sample data.
Mark
*Past performance is no indicator of future performance. Performance returns are based on hypothetical scenarios and do not represent an actual investment.
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I admire and respect your posts Nick and think they add real value to the bb. The main conclusion is always clear but I really struggle to understand some of the maths!