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Are the Best Small Companies the Best Investments?
Author(s) -
Bauman W. Scott,
Conover C. Mitchell,
Cox Don R.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of financial research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.319
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1475-6803
pISSN - 0270-2592
DOI - 10.1111/1475-6803.t01-1-00002
Subject(s) - earnings , investment (military) , excess return , business , earnings growth , mean reversion , rate of return , monetary economics , economics , accounting , finance , financial economics , paleontology , context (archaeology) , politics , political science , law , biology
Previous research finds that large companies previously judged to be excellent growth companies have subsequently been poor investments. We examine small companies selected by Business Week on the basis of multiple criteria used in annual articles featuring highly rated growth companies. We study the investment performance over the three years before eleven annual Business Week publications and the three years after publication. We find positive excess returns in the pre‐publication period, but negative excess returns in the post‐publication period. This reversal in investment performance appears to be due to a mean‐reversion tendency in operating performance, in which the earnings and the past rates of return on capital of such companies subsequently decrease significantly.