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 › High ROE (quality)

11High ROE (quality)

Hold companies with a high return on equity.

POINT

Result

vs. All-World: Lost
vs. TOPIX: Lost

After tax and costs it returned −1.4% 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)−1.4%
Annual return (before tax)−0.8%
Difference vs. All-World (after tax)−15.6pt
Difference vs. TOPIX (after tax)−12.6pt
3-year runs that beat All-World0% (75 runs)
3-year runs that beat TOPIX0% (75 runs)
Maximum drawdown−59.2%
Winning trades46% (121 trades)
Median trade return−3.4%

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 −4.1% to 4.6% (median −1.3%). 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