EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Since the launch of the Hong Kong-Mainland Stock Connect programs, there has been increasing interest in smart beta strategies within the Hong Kong equity market. Our analysis examined the effectiveness of six wellknown risk factors including size, value, low volatility, momentum, quality, and dividends in the Hong Kong equity market from June 30, 2006, to June 30, 2017.
- Apart from small caps, the rest of the examined factors delivered higher absolute and risk-adjusted returns in their equal-weighted top quintile portfolio versus their respective bottom quintile portfolios.
- The 50-stock high value and dividend portfolios delivered the highest excess returns, while those for the low volatility and quality showed reduced volatility compared to the underlying benchmark.
- Our macro regime analysis showed that factor portfolios in Hong Kong are sensitive to both the local market cycles and investor sentiment regimes.
- The distinct cyclicality in Hong Kong factor performance indicated its potential for implementation of active views on the local equity market.
FACTOR-BASED INVESTING IN THE HONG KONG EQUITY MARKET
Smart beta strategies have gained significant attention in the asset management industry, and the exchange-traded products tracking factor indices have experienced significant asset growth since the end of 2008. Factor-based investing shares some common characteristics with passive investing such as rules-based construction, transparency, and costefficiency, and it also shares features of active investing by aiming to enhance return and reduce risk compared to market-cap-weighted indices.
Single-factor indices are constructed explicitly to capture a specific risk factor and exhibit distinct cyclicality in response to a changing market environment, which also makes them ideal tools for implementation of active views. Index-linked products in low volatility (minimum variance) and multi-factor categories witnessed the strongest asset inflows among smart beta products in recent years.
In Hong Kong, the adoption of factor-based investing by local market participants is far behind the U.S. and other Asian markets like Japan. However, since the launch of the Hong Kong-Mainland Stock Connect programs, there has been increasing demand for factor-based index-linked products within the Hong Kong equity market. Due to the sluggish Chinese economy, potential renminbi depreciation, and the tight control on QDII quota, the stock connect programs have become favorable channels to facilitate offshore diversification for many mainland Chinese asset managers.
In this paper, we examined the effectiveness of six well-known risk factors (size, value, low volatility, momentum, quality, and dividend) in the Hong Kong equity market and their investability in practice, as well as the behavior of these factors under different market regimes.
