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You are here: Home / Connors Research / UPDATED – Buying Quality Companies in an Uptrend Strategy

UPDATED – Buying Quality Companies in an Uptrend Strategy

December 10, 2019 by Larry Connors and Chris Cain, CMT

This past weekend, we shared with you a high performing, simple to understand Quantamentals strategy which has out-performed buy and hold by over 700% since 2003.

Today, we’d like to share with you a Quantamentals strategy we originally published in August. This strategy outperformed buy and hold by over 1300%. 

Not only has it had superior performance, the strategy has gone viral in a number of places including on the Quantopian message board which is made up of tens of thousands of quant traders around the globe.

What Is Quantamentals?

As a reminder, Quantamentals is the combination of fundamental analysis, technical analysis, and quantitative analysis. 

While each of these has had historical edges, what you will see is that the combination of the three leads to greatly improved performance.

Combining fundamentals (F), technicals (T), and quant (Q) results in trading strategies with significant Alpha. 

F (fundamentals) + T (technicals)+ Q (quant) = Quantamentals

This combination often leads to performance which is much stronger than using any of these techniques by themselves. This is why some of the largest and most sophisticated hedge funds in the world are using this combination to manage portfolios.

Today we’re republishing our Quantamentals Quality Companies in An Uptrend strategy for you along with updating the test results through Dec 8, 2019.

We hope you enjoy learning this new high-performing strategy. 

If you’d like to learn how to build strategies like this for yourself, we invite you to listen to our free webinar held on Wednesday December 11 here.

Here is a reprint of the Journal with the test results updated

through December 8, 2019.

   Quantamentals In Action

What happens when you combine high performing quant strategies with high performing fundamental strategies? 

Designing trading strategies around Quantamentals is a rapidly growing research area in trading and finance. 

Today, in this issue of the Connors Research Traders Journal, we’re going to share with you an example of quantamentals at work. We believe you’ll like what you see.

The Strategy

Over time we plan on going much deeper on this topic. Today though, as a simple example, we are going to introduce a quantamental trading strategy designed to buy high-quality US companies in an uptrend. 

Our strategy combines fundamental factors, in this case, quality, with technical/quantitative trading rules.  This combination results in strong performance over the past 15 years, handily outperforming both the broad market and other stand-alone quality factor funds.

This strategy combines two well-known factors – quality, and relative momentum, into a complete trading strategy.  We also apply a trend following regime filter on the index itself, effectively shutting the strategy off if the overall trend of the market is down.  

What is Quality?

Quality is a well-known factor or driver of abnormal returns.  Academic and practitioner research has shown that companies that display “quality” characteristics tend to outperform in the long run.

The characteristics of “quality” companies are rather broad.  Quality is typically defined as companies that have some combination of:

  • stable earnings
  • strong balance sheets (low debt)
  • high return on equity
  • high earnings growth
  • high margins

In fact, the most famous investor in the world, Warren Buffet, applies the philosophy of buying high-quality companies that are cheap, essentially combining the quality and value factors.

How Will We Measure Quality?

For our strategy, we will focus on companies with high return on equity (ROE) ratios.  

ROE is calculated by dividing the net income of a company by the average shareholder equity.  Higher ROE companies indicate higher quality stocks. 

ROE = Net Income / Average Total Common Equity

High ROE companies have historically produced strong returns.  The following chart is from Standard and Poors. They ranked S&P 500 companies by ROE, then separated them into quartiles (four equal groups).  

As can clearly be seen, Quartile 1, companies with the highest ROEs, have outperformed over the last 25 years.

Introducing The Connors Research Quality Companies In An Uptrend Strategy

Instead of just buying and holding “quality” companies, in our case companies with high ROE statistics, we are going to combine the fundamental quality factor with technical characteristics.  

Specifically, once we identify our universe of “quality” companies, we are going to only buy those companies that have performed the strongest in the recent past, aka we only buy quality stocks that have strong momentum. 

In addition to that, we also are going to apply a trend following regime filter. This is applied to the index itself (in this case the S&P 500) and is designed to effectively turn our strategy “on” and “off” based on the overall trend of the market.  

We don’t take new buy signals if the overall market is trending lower. 

Rules for The Connors Research Quality Companies in an Uptrend Strategy:

  1. Stock Liquidity Filter.  We start with a universe of the 500 most liquid US Stocks.  This is determined by taking the 500 stocks with the highest average 200-day dollar volume, reconstituted every month.  This universe will be very similar to the S&P 500.
  2. Quality (ROE) Filter.  We then take the 50 stocks (top decile) with the highest ROE.  This is our quality screen, we are now left with 50 high-quality stocks.
  3. Quality Stocks With Strong Momentum.  We then buy the 10 stocks (of our 50 quality stocks) with the strongest relative momentum.  We measure this by total returns for each stock over the past 6 months. 
  4. Trend Following Regime Filter. We only enter new positions if the trailing 6-month total return for the S&P 500 is positive.  This is measured by the trailing 6-month total return of the ETF SPY.  
  5. This strategy is rebalanced once a month, at the end of the month.  We sell any stocks we currently hold that are no longer in our high ROE/high momentum list and replace them with stocks that have since made the list.  We only enter new long positions if the trend-following regime filter is passed (SPY’s 6-month momentum is positive). If the 6-month momentum of SPY is negative, no new entries are taken. 
  6. Any cash not allocated to stocks gets allocated the SHY (1-3yr US Treasuries)

Results

Comment On The Results

The Connors Research Quality Companies In An Uptrend Strategy showed strong performance overall, especially considering the relatively simple/straightforward logic.  

Our strategy outperformed the S&P 500 over this time frame by 8.8% per year with only slightly more volatility.  The max drawdown of our strategy also is roughly half of the max drawdown for the S&P 500, which is due to our trend-following regime filter.  Our strategy also witnessed an increased Sharpe Ratio compared to SPY over the last 15 years (0.97 vs 0.62).

Conclusion

Buying high-quality companies in an uptrend proved to be a robust and successful strategy over the last 15 years.  Through the use of Quantamentals we find improvements to single-factor funds, which typically buy and hold quality companies, by applying technical factors both in the form of quality stocks with high relative momentum as well as a trend following regime filter to keep us out of bear markets.

Learning More

If you’re interested in learning more about Quantamentals you’re invited to listen to a free webinar we conducted Wednesday, December 11 here. 

In the webinar, we’ll teach you more about Quantamentals, along with information on how you can further apply Quantamentals to your trading and investing. 

To listen to the webinar, please click here now.

Larry Connors and Chris Cain, CMT

Filed Under: Connors Research, Connors Research Traders Journal, Recent Tagged With: Quantamentals

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