Can retail investors capture factor premiums? – Empirical evidence on investable factor strategy

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School of Business | Master's thesis

Date

2024

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Finance

Language

en

Pages

33+3

Series

Abstract

Factor premiums are well documented in the theoretical setting of finance literature, yet whether factor premiums can be captured by retail investors who face constraints in their investment strategies remains unknown. In this thesis I study whether retail investors have been able to capture attractive factor returns by testing a simple investable trading strategy that goes long in 1-50 stocks with the highest factor exposure. I test the strategy for six individual factors and for two multifactor portfolios for period from July 1993 to June 2020. My results show economically significant but statistically insignificant evidence that retail investors could have captured factor returns that exceed the market benchmark by up to 3.27% annually. The results take trading costs into consideration and the overperformance is not explained by higher exposure to market risk.

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Thesis advisor

Rantapuska, Elias

Keywords

factor investing, retail investors, factor premiums, multifactor

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