FUNDAMENTALS
™
November 2015
Chasing Performance with ETFs
Chris Brightman, CFA, Feifei Li, Ph.D., FRM, and Xi Liu, CFA
Chris Brightman, CFA
“
What’s hot may
change abruptly, but
“
investors’ penchant for
what’s hot is steady.
KEY POINTS
1.
It is well established that many
investors tend to purchase “winning” stocks—those that have
recently outperformed—and to
shun “losers.”
2.
ETF providers evidently take
investors’ preference for winners into account by predominately launching funds whose
underlying indices are outperforming at the time they make
new product decisions.
3.
Strategies that produced excess
returns over the prior three years
generally behaved like an average investor’s portfolio after the
ETFs were launched.
Adventurous people who love riding in the
gondola of a hot-air balloon would naturally
detest plummeting to earth. Similarly, many
investors have a pronounced tendency to
channel funds to managers, strategies, and
stocks with superior short-term returns,
while steering clear of those that have been
on a losing streak.
Empirical studies have amply documented
this widespread propensity to favor
winners and shun losers, and behavioral
economists have cogently explained it.
As long as 30 years ago, De Bondt and
Thaler (1985; 1987) demonstrated that
investors’ partiality toward winners affects
market prices. Grinblatt, Titman, and
Wermers (1995), along with Wermers
(1999), documented that mutual funds
are, on average, trend chasers in their stock
purchase decisions, and that the trendchasing behavior is especially common
among growth and aggressive-growthoriented funds. Badrinath and Wahal
(2002) found similar results for other types
of institutional investors.
As recently as
this year, Hsu, Myers, and Whitby (2015)
showed that, much to their detriment,
investors repeatedly transfer assets from
underperforming to outperforming mutual
funds. This pattern of decision-making
persists even though it clearly results in
forgone gains or out-and-out losses in the
long run (Jegadeesh and Titman, 1993).
What’s hot may change abruptly, but
investors’ penchant for what’s hot is
steady, because it is sustained by ingrained
psychological forces and habitual cognitive
biases. Hong and Stein (1999) provided a
theoretical foundation in demonstrating that
trend chasers underreact to fundamentals
at first, and then overreact as their numbers
grow.
Early trend chasers profit from the
initial underreaction; late trend chasers lose
money. Some investors are overconfident
about their ability to pick stocks or time
the market, and in evaluating their own
performance, they give most weight to
decisions that have proven successful
(Daniel, Hirshleifer, and Subrahmanyam,
1998). Others, presumably less self-assured
and more in need of social validation, simply
follow the emotional crowd, buying the
popular stocks and selling the ones that
are out of favor (Howard, 2014).
Thus,
numerous factors contribute to investors’
enduring preference for winners.
Over the last 10 years, investors have grown
excited about exchange-traded funds (ETFs)
as a market-valued vehicle, and, accordingly,
providers have launched thousands of
them. As Figure 1 shows, ETFs have enjoyed
phenomenal growth, with the number of
funds expanding by an order of magnitude,
and assets under management increasing
more than sixfold through 2014.
Media Contacts
United States and Canada
Hewes Communications
+ 1 (212) 207-9450
hewesteam@hewescomm.com
Europe
JPES Partners (London)
+44 (0) 20 7520 7620
ra@jpespartners.com
. FUNDAMENTALS
November 2015
Figure 1. Global ETF Growth (1993–2014)
2,700
3,600
2,400
3,200
2,100
2,800
1,800
2,400
1,500
2,000
1,200
1,600
900
1,200
600
800
300
400
0
2005
2006
2007
2008
ETF-Launch Event Study
Our hypothesis is that the sponsors of
ETFs, aware of investors’ preference
for recent winners, select only
outperformers among the thousands of
indices available for new fund launches.
Evidence in support of this hypothesis
would be significantly positive relative
performance in the periods leading up
to the decision point for index selection.
In the interest of investor education,
we also sought to determine how the
2010
ETF Assets
Source: ETFGI.
How do ETF providers respond to
investors’ well-established preference
for strong recent performance? Our
empirical research supported the
common-sense conclusion: Because
they bring to market products that
investors will want to purchase, ETF
providers launch funds with hot
strategies. But in the process, our
research revealed a striking pattern of
investment performance.
2009
2011
2012
providers’ actual index choices worked
out after the ETFs came to market.
“
2013
Dec-14
0
ETFs
Early trend chasers
profit; late trend
chasers lose money.
“
Assets US$ (billions)
4,000
# ETFs
3,000
The event study is set up as follows
(Figure 2): Using Bloomberg, we
retrieve the long-only index-tracking
ETFs that were launched in U.S.
market from 1993 to 2014 and that
have at least a three-year record. We
then measure the performance of the
underlying indices relative to the broad
market, proxied by the Russell 3000
Index, over three-year periods before
and after the launch dates.
As shown in Figure 3, prior to the
ETFs’ launches, the underlying indices
typically exhibit strong performance.
The average annualized excess returns
over the Russell 3000 Index is nearly 5
percentage points, and the cumulative
outperformance over the three-year
period reaches around 15 percent.
More
interestingly, if we roll the clock back
by six months to the approximate time
the business decision was made (represented by the estimated application date
for SEC exemptive relief and registration
approval),1 we observe a local maximum
of the outperformance where the strong
upward trend peaks.
If index selections are made at the peak,
then, by definition, disappointing subsequent performance is inevitable. Indeed,
after the launch date, the superior performance evaporated. The strategies that
did well in the prior three years behaved
like an average investor’s portfolio after
being picked up by the ETF providers.
Cumulative post-launch excess returns
trace a flat line.
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FUNDAMENTALS
November 2015
Figure 2. Graphic Representation of the Event Study
ETF Launch Date
Index Performance
Index Performance
t ∈ [-36,0]
t ∈ [0,36]
Source: Research Affiliates, LLC.
Figure 3. Three-Year Cumulative Relative Index Performance
Before and After ETF Launch
Index Relative Performance Three Years Before & After ETF Launch
1.4
Average Application
Date to SEC
Cumulative Value of Excess Return
1.35
1.3
1.25
1.2
1.15
1.1
1.05
-36
-30
-24
-18
-12
-6
1
0
6
12
18
24
30
36
No. of Months since ETF Launch (t)
Source: Research Affiliates, LLC, using data from Bloomberg.
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FUNDAMENTALS
From Figure 3, we can see that the
indices’ excess return differences seem
to be economically significant before
and after the ETF launch. Are they
statistically significant as well? We
perform a panel regression analysis to
“
If index selections
are made at the
peak, disappointing
subsequent performance
is inevitable.
“
Panel Regression
November 2015
determine how much confidence we
should place in our findings. The panel
regression takes the form:
exReti ,t = b0 + b1 × Di ,t + ε i ,t
where exReti,t is the excess return
of the underlying index against the
Russell 3000 Index, and Di,t is a dummy
variable to identify whether the excess
return dates from before or after ETF
launch (e.g., Di,t = 1 if the excess return
is observed after ETF launch).
large enough sample of random returns,
favorable performance can happen by
chance. But it does not persist over time.
This may partially explain why, on average,
close-to-zero relative returns are observed
after the ETF launch event.
In Closing
The regression results in Table 1 indicate
the average excess return is 35 bps per
month prior to the launch and –4 bps per
month after the launch.
The difference
is –39 bps, with a t-stat as high as
–6.66. Thus, the statistical analysis
strongly validates the conclusion that
ETF issuers launch products that largely
track past winners.
Stock market investors tend to favor
The excess returns to strategies that don’t
have a sound theoretical underpinning
are likely to be random. And, given a
ETFs.
These results may help them make
strategies and stocks that have produced
superior returns in the recent past. Our
study supports the hypothesis that ETF
providers take investors’ preference for
winners into account when making new
product decisions. It also offers evidence
that
investors’
performance-chasing
behavior extends to their investments in
informed decisions—or at least ask good
questions—about new ETFs.
Table 1.
Panel Regression of Underlying Index Excess Post-Launch Returns
Coefficient
t-Stat
P-Value
0.35%
8.50
2.06E-17
-0.39%
-6.66
2.80E-11
Intercept
After-Launch Dummy
Source: Research Affiliates, LLC, using data from Bloomberg.
Endnote
1.
According to Conner (2011), it takes about six months to obtain the SEC’s
exemptive relief, a required step before an index-type ETF can be brought
to market.
References
Badrinath, S.G., and Sunil Wahal. 2002. “Momentum Trading by Institutions.”
Journal of Finance, vol.
57, no. 6 (December):2449–2478.
Conner, Thomas W. 2011.
Fundamentals of Mutual Funds and Exchange-Traded
Funds 2011: The Evolving Nature of Exchange-Traded Product Regulation. New York:
Practising Law Institute.
Daniel, Kent, David Hirshleifer, and Avanidhar Subrahmanyam. 1998.
“Investor
Psychology and Security Market Under- and Overreactions.” Journal of Finance,
vol. 53, no. 6 (December):1839–1885.
Grinblatt, Mark, Sheridan Titman, and Russ Wermers.
1995. “Momentum
Investment Strategies, Portfolio Performance, and Herding: A Study of Mutual
Fund Behavior.” American Economic Review, vol. 85, no.
5 (December):1088–1105.
Hong, Harrison, and Jeremy Stein. 1999. “A Unified Theory of Underreaction,
Momentum Trading, and Overreaction in Asset Markets.” Journal of Finance,
vol.
54, no. 6 (December):2143–2184.
Howard, C. Thomas.
2014. Behavioral Portfolio Management. Petersfield, U.K.:
Harriman House Ltd.
Hsu, Jason C., Brett W.
Myers, and Ryan J. Whitby. 2015.
“Timing Poorly: A
Guide to Generating Poor Returns While Investing in Successful Strategies.”
Journal of Portfolio Management (forthcoming). Available at http:/
/papers.ssrn.
com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2560434.
De Bondt, Werner F.M., and Richard Thaler. 1985.
“Does the Stock Market
Overreact?” Journal of Finance, vol. 40, no. 3 (July):793–805.
Jegadeesh, Narasimhan, and Sheridan Titman.
1993. “Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency.” Journal of
Finance, vol. 48, no.
1 (March):65–91.
———. 1987. “Further Evidence On Investor Overreaction and Stock Market
Seasonality.” Journal of Finance, vol.
42, no. 3 (July):557–581.
Wermers, Russ. 1999.
“Mutual Fund Herding and the Impact on Stock Prices.”
Journal of Finance, vol. 54, no. 2 (April):581–622.
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FUNDAMENTALS
November 2015
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