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Overall Market P/E Value Strategy
Jared Connor
posted
Getting Started Value

Hey everyone,

I have been plugging away at a couple of my first notebooks & backtests this weekend. Trying to stay in the fundamental/value realm to familiarize myself with the platform to start.

The overall approach was to try to determine expensive companies and cheap companies. I decided to utilize P/E ratios to label companies by taking the overall market (Russell 2000) P/E ratio. Then we can label the companies as cheap if they are below the market average, and expensive if they are above.

The results are fairly poor, but I believe that it could be due to the structure of the strategy. By failing to control for other factors such as sectors, growth estimates, and structural differences, comparing companies to the overall market could be a bad place to start.

Any recommendations are gladly welcomed. I will be posting a backtest of the strategy as well.

3 responses
Jared Connor

Associated backtest:

Thomas Guth

The P/E ratio is definitely not correct. Also a one year time horizon is way to short for value investing to really work

Darth Xanther

Instead of taking a fixed number for the P/E I'd suggest grouping the universe into quantiles, (or ranked lowest to highest), and then put the lowest vs the highest P/E ratio. As Thomas Guth said, 1 year is much to short. I would suggest 10 years or more for the predictive nature of fundamental analysis to truly be demonstrated. Especially in the past 2 years you will find fundamental metrics like P/B, P/E, P/CF have lost predictive value due to the algos pulling in energy sector companies that are depressed due to the low price of oil. I've tried sector weighting before and did not find that it helped in the long run. I would caution that I have found that going long with P/E info is more useful by itself than going long/short. I think this is because long a low P/E is more predictive on increased price performance than high P/E is on decreased price performance. Also when combined for a long /short strategy this does not help much as in down turns both are affected randomly imo. As such the long/short does not perform as well as just a straight up long low P/E.

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