Profitability of Style based Investment Strategies: Evidence from India

In this paper, we aim to identify profitable investment styles on the Indian stock market by using various combinations of important stock pricing anomalies consisting of. size, value, volume, profitability, earnings surprises, short term and long term prior returns. Using NSE200 stocks, three different investment styles viz. univariate, independent bivariate and conditional bivariate are constructed for the period July 2005-June 2016.Results show that on an absolute return basis, bivariate strategies do not seem to outperform univariate strategies. The unifactor CAPM is able to absorb 42% of the returns owing to the explanatory power of beta. After adjusting for risk using the three factor Fama and French (1993) model, 42% of the alphas are explained. However, additional risk factors from the Carhart (1997) model and Fama and French (2015) model do not provide any incremental explanatory power over the three factor model, recommending the use of the latter as a baseline to evaluate investment strategies in India. The highest supernormal returns of 1.1% per month are obtained from combining attributes and employing the conditional bivariate investment strategy viz.E2L1 (earnings momentum-Liquidity), M2S1 (price momentum-size), E2M3 (earnings momentum-price momentum). The findings are pertinent to portfolio managers, financial regulators and other stakeholders.