Value investing — buying assets that trade at a discount to their intrinsic or fundamental value — is one of the oldest and most robustly documented systematic return premia. As a quantitative signal, value is constructed by ranking assets on valuation metrics and going long the cheapest while shorting the most expensive.
Common value metrics by asset class
- Equities — Book-to-Market (B/M), earnings yield (E/P), sales-to-price, EBITDA/EV. The HML factor in Fama-French models is the canonical equity value factor.
- Fixed income — term premium (yield above short-rate); credit spread vs historical average.
- FX — real exchange rate vs purchasing power parity; current account balance relative to its historical mean.
- Commodities — futures price relative to a fundamental long-run cost-of-carry model.
Asness, Moskowitz, and Pedersen (2013) documented value strategies across all major asset classes, alongside momentum and carry. Value and momentum are negatively correlated, making them highly complementary in a diversified multi-signal framework.