Key features:

  • Market cap between 80 million and 1 billion.
  • Assigns scores to stocks based on fundamental ratios: TotalYield, EearningsYield, TotalAssetsGrowth, EVtoEBIT, BookValueYield.
  • Additionally assigns scores based on market cap - smaller caps receive higher score.
  • At the beginning of each year it will weigh stocks based on above criterias and purchase 35 top stocks and hold them for a year, then repeat the process.

This strategy is primarily based on Valuation and Operational ratios from Morningstar database. It will assign weights for each of the valuation ratio parameters as well as market cap. 

Generally smaller companies outperform larger companies, here, instead of hard capping universe to only small caps I found it's better leave a hard cap on 1 billion dollars, but base the final score on the market cap as well. This way it has lower chance to miss higher market cap bargains with exceptional fundamentals. 

Even based purely on market cap score you can already outperform S&P500, what makes this strategy outperform so much is filter only the “cheapest” stocks based on the following factors: larger total yield (dividend + buyback), larger earnings yield,, lower EV to EBIT ratio, higher book value yield.

Additionally I observed that stocks show mean reversion in their earnings growth and total assets year-to-year growth. So I added TotalAssetGrowth score to prefer lower total assets growth for the last year. This will somewhat prevent buying cyclical companies on top of their cycle.

I decided to use holding of 1 year to optimize on taxes (long term tax vs short term) as well as fees.

There are multiple papers I used to base my decisions on, let me know in the comments I can link them and explain further the logic behind some of the choices.