Perspective
May 27, 2022
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Cliff Asness
It often seems like the world sees value investing as either implicitly or explicitly all about the technology sector vs. everything else. In reality, there are many different kinds of strategies and bets that are often labeled “value.” Our value bet is long and short extremely diversified portfolios of global stocks with a serious attempt not to bet on industries (like tech) – and we are very happy about that, both long-term strategically and tactically today.
Perspective
February 4, 2022
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Cliff Asness
Over these past two months, value’s returns, as we measure them, have been incredibly strong. This has killed the value spread. That is, it’s about as high as it was in the tech bubble. Just not as high as a few months ago. Yes, “killed” was sarcasm.
Perspective
December 16, 2021
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Cliff Asness
They say a picture is worth 1000 words. I’m embracing the concept in this post, which is just a single graph presenting the value spread constructed using the methodology that most closely reflects how we actually view value at AQR. Spoiler alert: the spread continued to explode higher in 2021. Despite this, we still made some money on value this year, which makes us very excited for 2022 and beyond. Also, if we’re wrong, I think I can make an NFT of this graph and really cash in.
August 25, 2021
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Portfolio Solutions Group
The value spread remains unusually high, which has led investors to be concerned that value may be cheap for a reason. In this short presentation, our Portfolio Solutions Group (PSG) explains how we evaluate this spread and illustrates our view that the current high value spread is forecasting higher expected returns, and not low fundamental growth rates.
Perspective
March 4, 2021
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Cliff Asness
Everyone knows the value strategy has been a grave disappointment out-of-sample since, say, 1990, based on realized returns. However, odd as it might sound, the realized average return on a strategy is not necessarily the best estimate of its true long-term expected return. In fact, the right estimate of the true long-term expected return of the value strategy is considerably higher than many might think if they were to just look at simple past returns – especially right now. Why? I explain it in this note (spoiler: it has to do with changes in valuation).
Perspective
May 8, 2020
When value has underperformed for so long, it’s natural and proper that people wonder if it’s ever going to work again. To test the popular explanations for why value investing is “broken,” Cliff tweaks the value factor’s construction to remove the stocks that best fit these stories. He finds no “this time is different” explanation holds water, affirming our belief that the medium-term odds are rather dramatically on value’s side.
Perspective
November 7, 2019
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Cliff Asness
Cliff discusses how to measure whether a factor, in this case the value factor, is itself rich or cheap versus history. The answer, regardless of the approach taken in measuring cheapness, is that value is currently quite cheap compared to history.
Perspective
September 17, 2018
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Cliff Asness
As promised, for those looking for a more manageable read, here is a condensed, “medium” length version of my recent much longer post.
Journal Article
Winner of a Special Distinction Award in the 2021 Harry M. Markowitz Awards
July 2, 2019
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Antti Ilmanen
Rachel Lee
Tobias J. Moskowitz
Ashwin Thapar
We examine four prominent factor premia – value, momentum, carry, and defensive – over a century from six asset classes. The results offer support for time-varying risk premia models with important implications for theory seeking to explain the sources of factor returns.
Journal Article
Winner of an Outstanding Article award in the 2022 Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Awards
December 4, 2017
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Cliff Asness
John M. Liew
Lasse H. Pedersen
Ashwin Thapar
We examine the efficacy of a hypothetical deep value strategy—where the valuation spread between cheap and expensive securities is wide relative to its history—across global asset classes and also provide new evidence on competing theories for the value premium.