Do Popular Stock Strategies Work? A 10-Year Test on Japanese StocksStage B: Pick by financial metrics (screening)日本語Back to chart

All strategies › Pick by metrics › Low P/E (value)

10Low P/E (value)

Hold stocks with a low price-to-earnings ratio — cheap relative to their profits.

POINT

Result

vs. All-World: Mixed
vs. TOPIX: Won

After tax and costs it returned 13.5% a year. Holding the all-world index over the same period returned 14.2%, and TOPIX 11.2%.

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All-World indexTOPIXThis strategy
Growth of ¥1M (log scale, month-end). The strategy is after tax and costs; indexes include dividends. Values in ¥10,000.
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The numbers

Annual return (after tax & costs)13.5%
Annual return (before tax)16.4%
Difference vs. All-World (after tax)−0.7pt
Difference vs. TOPIX (after tax)+2.3pt
3-year runs that beat All-World63% (75 runs)
3-year runs that beat TOPIX71% (75 runs)
Maximum drawdown−47.6%
Winning trades57% (212 trades)
Median trade return4.0%

What if the exit rule were different?

Here we re-screen and rebalance every three months. Keeping the same entry but switching among 16 exit rules gives after-tax annual returns of 0.3% to 17.1% (median 9.3%). Compare with 14.2% for the all-world index.

Picking the best of 16 after the fact tends to find a lucky one, so we fixed the exit rule by strategy type in advance.

Assumptions