Factor Crowding and Liquidity Exhaustion

Abstract

Well‐known anomalies and stable patterns in equity returns are widely employed to guide stock selection. The use of overlapping multifactor models built on these patterns induces correlated trade across investors. A stock with a strong signal from a parsimonious multifactor stock selection model exhibits changes in trade activity, net order imbalances, lower volatility, lower liquidity level, and changes in liquidity comovement consistent with correlated trade. These results illustrate that correlated trading among investors can affect the liquidity and risk of the securities they trade, and imply that measures of portfolio liquidity risk that ignore these changes can understate risk.

When it rains, it pours: Multifactor asset management in good and bad times

“…Panels A and B in Table 2 report intra‐group pairwise correlations as well as correlations with the market, for sectors and factors, respectively. The average correlation computed for factors (0.92) is higher than the one obtained for sectors (0.66), signaling that diversification benefits will be harder to capture with factors than with sectors (Marks & Shang, 2019). In fact, sectors are mutually exclusive (each stock belongs to a single sector), while factors can overlap.…”