In The Absence of Value, Investors Opt for Trash

SocGen Global Quantitative Research analysts Andrew Lapthome and Georgios Oikonomou look at how September fared across the various popular investment screens and come up with some interesting findings.

Investment screens: The flight to trash

Even though equity markets had one of the best Septembers ever, investors seemed to be scraping the barrel – plumping for low quality and weak balance sheet names due to a dearth of quality or value companies.

Ironically, the strong market performance hitherto has led to a fall in the number of eligible candidates that show up on the screens – only 21 deep value and 25 quality companies appear, that is 46 candidates in all, compared to 53 last month and...