Practical Applications of The Impact of Market Conditions on Active Equity Management

Practical Applications Summary

In The Impact of Market Conditions on Active Equity Management, from the Winter 2018 edition of The Journal of Portfolio Management, authors Harsh Parikh of PGIM, Karen McQuiston of BlackRock, and Sujian Zhi of Huatai Securities analyze the performance of active equity management approaches relative to a trio of measures of “market conditions”: (1) dispersion of returns across equities during a given period, (2) volatility of overall market returns over time, and (3) the overall level of market returns. The authors’ goal is to help investors meet their objectives through portfolio constructions suited to variations in those conditions. The authors explore how, between 1996 and 2016, the excess returns delivered by active equity managers—both quantitative and fundamental—fared in response to different market environments.

The authors collected and arranged into quartiles 21 years of market-condition data from the large-cap U.S. equity space, modeling the relative performance of a potpourri of portfolio combinations—a mix of core, growth, and value styles and of high-, moderate-, and low-intensity management approaches—against the three market conditions.

The authors uncovered correlations between certain active management approaches and predominating market conditions. They note that the reputation of active equity management, currently in question, might be boosted if markets begin to falter and greater dispersion is seen across individual stock returns, which could rekindle the effectiveness of judicious stock picking.