Focus on stocks with strong fundamentals

Article Excerpt

To gain a better understanding of the stock market’s performance, portfolio managers often divide markets into smaller segments. Large, medium, and small companies are one way used to divide the market. Another is to divide the market into individual industry segments such as energy, consumer or healthcare. A less followed method is to divide the market according to “factors.” In the context of investing, a factor is any characteristic that helps explain the long-term risk and return performance of an asset. Typical groups of stocks formed based on their common factor characteristics include “Value,” “Growth,” “Momentum,” “Low Volatility” (or “Quality”). While each of these “factors” deserve a separate discussion, we will, for the purposes of this article focus on the Quality factor. Market data and academic studies have established that quality companies tend to perform better than the overall market over long periods. The risk involved in these investments is also lower than the broad market. How is Quality defined? Investors have different definitions…