Brig, Soren and Reidar-
Here is a lesson from markets. They are broken too. Measures of competence and quality no longer work. It is similar to getting a promotion at work, or an award in science. Competence, or quality in performance is no longer rewarded.
This is profound, because it means the system is broken. The stock market is broken. It’s purpose is broken. It will fail, and start afresh someday. It cannot be reformed.
The green line below is the S&P 500 index. The white line below is a Quality Index sponsored by Deutsche Bank. They look at 1,000 global companies and evaluate them for return on equity, return on invested capital, and accounting accruals … quantifiable proxies for the most common ways that investors think about quality. Because the goal is to isolate the Quality factor, the index is long in equal amounts the top 20% of measured companies and short the bottom 20% (so market neutral), and has equal amounts invested long and short in the component sectors of the market (so sector neutral). The chart begins on March 9, 2009, when the Fed launched its first QE program.
Over the past eight and a half years, Quality has been absolutely useless as an investment derivative. You’ve made a grand total of not quite 3% on your investment, while the S&P 500 is up almost 300%.
This is not a typo.
Have the Quality stocks in your portfolio gone up over the past eight and a half years? Sure, but it’s not because of the Quality-ness of the companies. It’s because ALL stocks have gone up ever since Object 3, the balance sheets of central banks, started exerting its massive gravity on everything BUT Quality. That’s not an accident, by the way. Central banks don’t care about rewarding “good” companies. In fact, if they care about anything on this dimension, they care about keeping “bad” companies from going under.
This is what it looks like when spring does not follow winter.