Factor Investing
Somewhere between buying the entire market and picking stocks by hand, there’s a middle path: investing based on specific, measurable characteristics research has tied to returns.
What Is It
Factor investing means building a portfolio around specific, historically studied characteristics — value (cheap relative to fundamentals), size (smaller companies), momentum, quality, low volatility — rather than simply holding the total market or hand-picking individual stocks.
Why It Matters
It’s a genuine middle ground: factor funds are still rules-based, broadly diversified, and low-cost like a typical index fund, but deliberately tilt toward characteristics research has associated with different return and risk profiles over long periods. That said, this isn’t a guarantee — any given factor can underperform the broad market for years at a stretch, and the research on how reliably these effects persist is genuinely debated.
Quick Example
A value-factor fund might screen the entire market down to companies trading cheap relative to their earnings, then weight the fund by that criterion instead of by company size. You still end up with a diversified basket of stocks — just filtered and weighted on a different basis than a standard market-cap-weighted index fund.
Two of these factors — size and value — have the deepest academic research behind them, going back to Eugene Fama and Kenneth French’s landmark 1993 model. Their finding wasn’t just that small companies or cheap (value) companies each outperform on their own — it’s that the two interact: small-cap value has historically been the standout combination, while small-cap growth has been one of the weakest.
Try It Yourself
Whatever factor tilt a portfolio takes, the growth math underneath it works the same way — model it here.
📈Compound Interest Calculator
Model how any portfolio grows over time, regardless of which factors or characteristics it’s built around.