EEUU: Comprar valores que hacen split da muy buen resultado

Fuente:  marketwatch.com   Mark Hulbert

It’s been nearly five months since Apple announced it would split its shares seven-for-one. During that time, its stock has gained about 36%.

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A coincidence? The historical data suggest not: The average stock that undergoes a split tends to outperform the market for several years after the event is announced.

Consider the performance of an investment newsletter whose model portfolio includes only stocks that have announced a stock split. The newsletter is called 2 for 1, and it is edited by Neil MacNeale. Over the nearly 14 years that the Hulbert Financial Digest has tracked this service, its model portfolio has produced a 10.4% annualized return, more than doubling the 5.1% annualized return over the same period of the Wilshire 5000 index. (Both returns assume dividends are reinvested.)

MacNeale’s performance has been so impressive that an exchange traded fund has been created that will closely match his newsletter’s model portfolio. The NYSE informs me that this new ETF — known as the Stock Split Index Fund, with a ticker of TOFR — will begin trading this week.

Stock splits’ impressive performance comes as a big surprise to those who consider them to be nothing more than bookkeeping transactions. With Apple’s split, for example, owners got seven post-split shares for each pre-split share they held, and each of those new shares was worth one-seventh as much. Why does that have anything to do with the real world?

David Ikenberry, dean of University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, has conducted several studies of stocks undergoing splits. He says the answer traces to a “sweet spot” in which the typical company likes to have its stock trade. Though that sweet spot is not precisely defined, companies will not split their shares — even if their prices have risen sharply above that sweet spot — if management believes there is a significant probability that they will fall back into that range by themselves.

In effect, therefore, stock splits are a signal from management that they have confidence in the continued appreciation of their companies’ shares. It is not the stock split itself that is bullish but what it signals in the minds of corporate management.

Notice carefully that just the opposite conclusion should therefore apply to stocks undergoing so-called reverse splits, in which a company exchanges low-priced old shares for higher-priced new shares. In such a case, management is signalling that it has little confidence that its shares — on their own, without an artificial boost — would soon trade at a higher price.

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Sure enough, Ikenberry reports that stocks undergoing reverse splits tend to underperform the market over the several years following the announcements of those reverse splits. A classic example from recent years is Citicorp’s March 2011 announcement that its shares would undergo a 1-for-10 reverse split. Since that announcement, its shares have gained 17.9%, versus 62.9% for the Wilshire 5000.

The academic studies of stocks undergoing splits suggest that you could beat the market by simply creating a portfolio that contained all stocks undergoing a so-called forward split (the opposite of a reverse split). But MacNeale believes he can do even better by investing only in stocks that, at the time of their splits, are trading for relatively low ratios of price to earnings or book value.

His approach calls for him, each month, to pick one stock from the list of those that, over the previous month, have announced a stock split. The stock that he most recently added is Amphenol which recently said it would split its shares two-for-one, effective Oct. 10.

MacNeale invariably holds each of his recommended stocks for 30 months before selling them. As a result, his model portfolio at any given time holds 30 positions. The new ETF that begins trading this week will be benchmarked to an index that is equally weighted among those 30 stocks.

Its performance should therefore be quite close to what the HFD reports for MacNeale’s newsletter. Assuming the future is like the past, that bodes well for this new ETF.