STOCK PERFORMANCE: Growth v. Value Investing for Physicians

BY DR. DAVID EDWARD MARCINKO: MBA MEd CMP™

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SPONSOR: http://www.MarcinkoAssociates.com

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Performance of Growth & Value Stocks

Although many academics argue that value stocks outperform growth stocks, the returns for individuals investing through mutual funds demonstrate a near match. 

Introduction

A 2005 study Do Investors Capture the Value Premium? written by Todd Houge at The University of Iowa and Tim Loughran at The University of Notre Dame found that large company mutual funds in both the value and growth styles returned just over 11 percent for the period of 1975 to 2002. This paper contradicted many studies that demonstrated owning value stocks offers better long-term performance than growth stocks. 

The studies, led by Eugene Fama PhD and Kenneth French PhD, established the current consensus that the value style of investing does indeed offer a return premium. There are several theories as to why this has been the case, among the most persuasive being a series of behavioral arguments put forth by leading researchers. The studies suggest that the out performance of value stocks may result from investors’ tendency toward common behavioral traits, including the belief that the future will be similar to the past, overreaction to unexpected events, “herding” behavior which leads at times to overemphasis of a particular style or sector, overconfidence, and aversion to regret. All of these behaviors can cause price anomalies which create buying opportunities for value investors.

Another key ingredient argued for value out performance is lower business appraisals. Value stocks are plainly confined to a P/E range, whereas growth stocks have an upper limit that is infinite.  When growth stocks reach a high plateau in regard to P/E ratios, the ensuing returns are generally much lower than the category average over time. 

Moreover, growth stocks tend to lose more in bear markets.  In the last two major bear markets, growth stocks fared far worse than value.  From January 1973 until late 1974, large growth stocks lost 45 percent of their value, while large value stocks lost 26 percent. Similarly, from April 2000 to September 2002, large growth stocks lost 46 percent versus only 27 percent for large value stocks. These losses, academics insist, dramatically reduce the long-term investment returns of growth stocks.

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However, the study by Houge and Loughran reasoned that although a premium may exist, investors have not been able to capture the excess return through mutual funds.  The study also maintained that any potential value premium is generated outside the securities held by most mutual funds.  Simply put, being growth or value had no material impact on a mutual fund’s performance.

Listed below in the table are the annualized returns and standard deviations for return data from January 1975 through December 2002.

Index                              Return                         SD      

S&P 500                            11.53%                     14.88%

Large Growth Funds         11.30%                     16.65%

Large Value Funds             11.41%                    15.39%

 Source:  Hough/Loughran Study

The Hough/Loughran study also found that the returns by style also varied over time.  From 1965-1983, a period widely known to favor the value style, large value funds averaged a 9.92 percent annual return, compared to 8.73 percent for large growth funds. This performance differential reverses over 1984-2001, as large growth funds generated a 14.1 percent average return compared to 12.9 percent for large value funds.  Thus, one style can outperform in any time period.

However, although the long-term returns are nearly identical, large differences between value and growth returns happen over time.   This is especially the case over the last ten years as growth and value have had extraordinary return differences – sometimes over 30 percentage points of under performance. 

This table indicates the return differential between the value and growth styles since 1992.

YEARLY RETURNS OF GROWTH/VALUE STOCKS

YearGrowthValue
19925.1%10.5%
19931.7%18.6%
19943.1%-0.6%
199538.1%37.1%
199624.0%22.0%
199736.5%30.6%
199842.2%14.7%
199928.2% 3.2%
2000-22.1%6.1%
2001-26.7%7.1%
2002-25.2%-20.5%
200328.2%27.7%
2004 6.3%16.5%
2005 3.6%6.1%
2006 10.8%20.6%
20078.8%1.5%
2008-38.43%-36.84%
200937.2%19.69%
201016.71%15.5%
20112.64%0.39%
201215.25%17.50%

Source:  Ibbottson.

Between the third quarter of 1994 and the second quarter of 2000, the S&P Growth Index produced annualized total returns of 30 percent, versus only about 18 percent for the S&P Value Index.  Since 2000, value has turned the tables and dramatically outperformed growth.  Growth has only outperformed value in two of the past eight years.  Since the two styles are successful at different times, combining them in one portfolio can create a buffer against dramatic swings, reducing volatility and the subsequent drag on returns. 

Assessment

In our analysis, the surest way to maximize the benefits of style investing is to combine growth and value in a single portfolio, and maintain the proportions evenly in a 50/50 split through regular rebalancing.  Research from Standard & Poor’s showed that since 1980, a 50/50 portfolio of value and growth stocks beats the market 75 percent of the time.

Conclusion

Due to the fact that both styles have near equal performance and either style can outperform for a significant time period, a medical professional might consider a blending of styles.  Rather than attempt to second-guess the market by switching in and out of styles as they roll with the cycle, it might be prudent to maintain an equal balance your investment between the two.

EDUCATION: Books

SPEAKING: Dr. Marcinko will be speaking and lecturing, signing and opining, teaching and preaching, storming and performing at many locations throughout the USA this year! His tour of witty and serious pontifications may be scheduled on a planned or ad-hoc basis; for public or private meetings and gatherings; formally, informally, or over lunch or dinner. All medical societies, financial advisory firms or Broker-Dealers are encouraged to submit a RFP for speaking engagements: MarcinkoAdvisors@outlook.com 

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GROWTH STOCKS: Physicians Grabbing the Investing Momentum

CATCHING THE GROWTH MOMENTUM

BY DR.DAVID EDWARD MARCINKO; MBA MED CMP™

SPONSOR: http://www.MarcinkoAssociates.com

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Investing in Growth Stocks – Catching the Momentum [BIG-MO]

The growth style of investing focuses on companies with strong earnings and accelerating capital growth. A growth investor will make investment decisions based on forecasts of continuing growth in earnings. Growth investing emphasizes qualitative criteria, including value judgments about the company, its markets, its management, and its ability to extract future earnings growth from the particular industry.

Quantitative indicators of interest to the growth investor include high Price/Earnings ratios, Price/Sales ratios, and low dividend yields. A high P/E ratio suggests that the market is prepared to pay more per share in anticipation of future earnings. A low dividend yield suggests that the company is reinvesting rather than distributing profits. These indicators are considered in relation to the company’s immediate competitors. The companies with the highest P/E ratios relative to their industry will often be dominant within their market segment and have strong growth prospects. Growth investors will generally focus on premium and leading-edge companies.

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Some industry sectors by their nature have stronger growth characteristics, particularly more innovative and speculative industries. 

For example, during the bull market run on the U.S. stock markets during the late 1990s, the technology sector was a major area of growth investment.   On observing strong earnings growth, a growth investor will decide whether to buy shares based on whether the company’s growth is going to continue at its present rate, to increase, or to decrease.  If it is expected to increase, the growth investor will consider it a candidate for purchase.  The key research question is: at what point will the company’s growth flatten out, or fall? If a company’s growth rate slows or reverses, it is no longer attractive to a growth investor. Growth investors are normally prepared to pay a premium for what they believe to be high quality shares. The potential downside in growth investing is that if a company goes into sudden decline and the share price falls, you can lose capital value rapidly.

Growth stocks, like the current “Magnificent-Seven“, carry high expectations of above-average future growth in earnings and above-average valuations.  Investors expect these stocks to perform well in the future and are willing to pay high P/E multiples for this expected growth.   The danger is that the price may become too high. Generally, once a company sports a P/E ratio above 50, the risk significantly escalates. Many technology growth stocks traded at a P/E ratio of above 100 during 1999. This is unsustainable.  No company in the history of the stock market has been able to maintain such a high P/E level for a sustained period of time. 

EDUCATION: Books

SPEAKING: Dr. Marcinko will be speaking and lecturing, signing and opining, teaching and preaching, storming and performing at many locations throughout the USA this year! His tour of witty and serious pontifications may be scheduled on a planned or ad-hoc basis; for public or private meetings and gatherings; formally, informally, or over lunch or dinner. All medical societies, financial advisory firms or Broker-Dealers are encouraged to submit a RFP for speaking engagements: MarcinkoAdvisors@outlook.com 

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DEMAGOGUES: Value and Growth Stocks

SPECIAL REPORT

By Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA

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About Value & Growth Demagogues
You can listen to a professional narration of this article on iTunes & online.
I have a problem with both growth and value demagogues.

Growth demagogues will argue that valuation is irrelevant for high-growth companies because the price you pay for growth doesn’t matter. They usually say this after a very extended move in growth stocks, where these investors look like gods that walk on water. They call value investors “accountants.”

The price you pay matters (this is not a new message). As we’ve discussed in the past, if you bought great, high-growth companies near the end of the Nifty Fifty bubble in the 1960s or near the end of the dotcom bubble in the 1990s, it took more than a decade to break even (after first struggling through double-digit losses).

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REVIEW: Style-Based Stock Portfolio Performance Evaluations

Stock or Manager Relevance Comparisons and Philosophy

By Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA, MEd, CMP™

SPONSOR: http://www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.org

[Publisher-in-Chief]

One relatively recent performance evaluation approach that was developed to help improve the relevance of comparisons is the separation of stock universes and managers by style. This classification method attempts to distinguish between stocks or manager philosophies based upon general financial characteristics of the investments.

The Managers

In very general terms, a manager is often a growth manager if the investment approach that the manager uses focuses on stocks showing growth and momentum in its earnings and price.

A value manager is generally considered to be a manager that attempts to identify under-valued securities based upon fundamental analysis of the company.  A stock may be considered either “growth” or “value” based on a given set of valuation measures such as price-to-earnings, price-to-book value, and dividend yield.

The Style

The goal of style-based performance comparisons is to take some of the biases of the market environment out of the comparison, since a portfolio’s returns will ideally be evaluated versus a universe of alternatives that represent similar investment characteristics facing the same basic market environment.  Thus, if the environment is one in which investors in stocks with strong past earnings and price momentum have generally performed better than those using fundamental analysis to find under-valued stocks, comparing the growth/momentum portfolio to a growth index or universe should help eliminate the bias.

Style-based universes can help the medical professional better understand the basic environment captured over a given performance time period.

However, there are significant limitations with the various approaches to constructing style-based stock and manager universes that should be understood if they are to be used in direct performance comparisons.  Taking style-based stock universes separately from style-based manager universe, one of the most significant issues regarding the categorization of stocks by “growth” and “value” styles is the lack of agreement in the specification of what a growth stock is versus a value stock.  With some universes divided by price-to-book value, others by price-to-earnings and/or dividend yields and some by combinations of similar variables, stocks are often classified very differently by two different stock universes.  Further, stocks move across a broad spectrum as their price and fundamentals change, resulting in stocks constantly moving between growth and value categories for any given universe.  If there is ambiguity in the rating of a given stock, then the difficulty is only compounded when we attempt to boil what may be complex investment processes of an investment manager or mutual fund portfolio manager to a simple classification of growth or value.  A beaten down cyclical stock that no self-respecting growth/momentum manager would purchase may be classified as “growth” because it has a high price-to-earnings ratio (i.e., from low earnings) or a high price-to-book value (i.e., from asset write-offs).  Value managers are not the only ones to own low valuation stocks that have improving earnings.

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The second problem with style categorization is that managers are often misclassified or they purposefully “game” the categorization of their own process in order to appear more competitive.  As an example, if a manager that typically looks for relatively strong earnings/price momentum is lagging in a period when “growth” managers are outperforming, the rank of the manager can be improved simply by claiming a “value” approach.  Morningstar’s “style box” classification of mutual funds by size and style of the current portfolio highlight this problem for any given fund by showing how their portfolio has changed its classification annually.

Current Events

The stock market has been booming lately. Up almost 100% since March 2009, after being down almost 50%. And so, perhaps this is a good time to re-evaluate the performance of your investment portfolio[s].

Assessment

However, this leads to an interesting question for the medical professional or his/her advisor: If a manager is still using the same basic investment philosophy and disciplines, but their “style” category has changed according to the ratings service, should you fire them?  If the answer is “yes”, then the burden of monitoring and the cost of manager turnover are an inevitable part of narrow style based performance comparisons.

But, if the answer is “no,” then it is easy to see the difficulty of fitting every management approach into a simple style box.  The more reasonable alternative is to use style-based stock and manager universes as a tool for understanding the environment, rather than an absolute performance benchmark.

Conclusion

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