Why value investing works in the long run
By George Athanassakos * >>> Investors widely use the terms value stocks and growth stocks, but many do not know what they mean. Academic researchers sort stocks by price-to-earnings (PE), price-to-book (PB) or other valuation metrics from low to high and form a number of portfolios from the sorted stocks. They call the lowest PE stocks ‘value’ stocks and the highest PE stocks ‘growth’ stocks. While academics do not know which stocks from the value group value investors will eventually buy, they do know that value investors mostly choose stocks from the low PE group, the so-called value stocks, and avoid stocks from the high PE group, the so-called growth stocks. This is what I call the naive value investing approach. But let’s look more closely at this naive definition of value investing and examine why naive value investing tends to focus on low PE or PB stocks. These ratios are a function of the growth rate of earnings going forward. This relatio...