MFOHome About Commentary Discussions Funds The Best Resources Support Us!

Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Sign In Register

Categories

In this Discussion

Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.

    Support MFO

  • Donate through PayPal

Active Share Food Fight

heezsafe
in Fund Discussions
Jack Vogel, at Alpha Architect, updates (with all links needed to follow) the recent back-and-forth between the authors of the original papers describing the active share effect and the contrarians at AQR who don't think much of it.

http://blog.alphaarchitect.com/2015/09/21/active-share-debate-aqr-versus-academics/

The authors have not taken kindly to AQR's questioning of their claims, and write in the abstract of a swing-back paper:
This paper’s first and main aim is to establish that the AQR paper should not be interpreted using typical academic standards. Instead, our conjecture is that this AQR paper falls into a wonderfully creative but altogether different genre, which we label the Wonderland Genre, as its main characteristic seems to be “Sentence First, Verdict Later.” ...{...] Thirdly and finally, we impolitely consider why AQR may not be a big fan of Active Share by taking a look at the AQR mutual funds offered to retail investors. We find that these tend to have relatively low Active Shares, have shown little outperformance to date (with performance data ending in 2014) and thus seem fairly expensive given the amount of differentiation they offer.

h/t Tadas Viskanta @ Abnormal Returns

Comments

  • scott
    <---- Still happy with QLENX.
  • VintageFreakVintageFreak
    edited September 2015
    Where's Maury Povich when you need him. Please take the fight there.

    Research. Searching twice on Google is not Re-search.

    AQR does not like Active Share because their funds don't have Active Share.

    I don't like sugar because I'm diabetic. No wait. I'm diabetic because I like sugar. Thing is I can't have sugar.

    Investment managers have to buy what's working for them aka what's going up. People have short memories. Investors also die because of diabetes, so have no memories. ARIVX has a lot of active share right? No...how the heck or why you buy stocks that are not going up just to have active share? The ones going up are reflected in the index.

    I think it is time to simplify our life instead of listening to people just because they have PhDs.
  • BobCBobC
    Thanks, VintageFreak. You made me laugh, but what you say is so true. ActiveShare does not mean good returns. It's just a strategy. And the folks at AQR are undoubtedly more intelligent than am I. But intelligence and PhDs alone do not mean good returns. The latest rage is Smart Beta, which I suspect will fall by the wayside of other technically sound but unproven and expensive theories. As you said, simplify.
Sign In or Register to comment.