www.factset.com Truly Active Management Requires a Commitment to Excellence: PORTFOLIO CONSTRUCTION + MANAGEMENT WITH FACTSET Bijan Beheshti, John Guerard, and Chris Mercs Truly Active Management Requires a Commitment to Excellence: Portfolio Construction and Management with FactSet1 Bijan Beheshti FactSet Research Systems Inc. San Francisco, CA John Guerard McKinley Capital Management, LLC Anchorage, AK 99503 (
[email protected]) and Chris Mercs FactSet Research Systems Inc. San Francisco, CA February 2020 This paper is forthcoming in John Guerard and William T. Ziemba, Editors, Handbook of Applied Investment Research (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2020). 1 The authors thank Ross Sharp, formerly of FactSet, who created the R-robust regression script. Truly Active Management Requires a Commitment to Excellence: Portfolio Construction and Management with FactSet Financial anomalies have been studied in the U.S. and recent evidence suggests that they have diminished in the U.S. and possibly in non-U.S. portfolios. Have the anomalies changed and are they persistent? Have historical and earnings forecasting data been a consistent and highly statistically significant source of excess returns? We test many financial anomalies of the 1980s-1990s and report that several models and strategies continue to produce statistically significant excess returns. We also test a large set of U.S. and global variables over the past 16 years and report that many of these fundamental, earnings forecasts, revisions, breadth and momentum, and cash deployment strategies maintained their statistical significance during the 2003-2018 time period. Moreover, the earnings forecasting model and robust regression estimated composite model excess returns are greater in Non-U.S.