Beating the Swedish Market : A dynamic approach to Value Investing using Modern Portfolio Theory

• Main Authors: Karlsson, Viktor, Nygren, Emil
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för ekonomi och företagande 2012
• Subjects: Behavioural Finance; Capital Asset Pricing Model; Contrarian; Efficient Market Hypothesis; Glamour stocks; Investment Strategy; Market-to-Book-Value; Minimum-Variance; Modern Portfolio Theory; Risk-adjusted performance; Stock screening; Value stocks
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-16465

Previous research has confirmed the existence of a value premium in a wide array of markets and using this value stock anomaly has yielded superior performance. This thesis investigates if one could take advantage of the existence of a value premium to deploy a dynamic investment strategy on the Swedish stock market (OMXS30) with focus on minimizing risk to achieve higher risk adjusted performance than the stock market index. The investment strategy implemented use Market-to-Book-Value to screen for both entry and exit signals and Modern Portfolio Theory, using the minimum-variance portfolio with short-selling constraints, to allocate assets within the portfolio. The investment strategy is evaluated using the Modigliani-Modigliani Risk Adjusted Performance measure. Conclusions from the thesis are that the strategy does outperform the Swedish stock market index, both in terms of nominal return and risk-adjusted performance. The suboptimal behaviour of investors where they overreact  to signals and unconsciously rely on heuristics is used to explain why this is possible. Market-to-Book-Value, using the first quartile as entry signal and third quartile as exit signal, is considered to be a successful key ratio to screen for value stocks.