Chinese RMs Outperform US RMs, But Neither Does Particularly Well

Chinese reverse mergers (CRM) have a bad reputation with investors. There have been so many fraud allegations over the years that shorting CRMs was practically an investment strategy at one point, and in 2011 the Securities and Exchange Commission warned investors to be wary of reverse mergers (RM) across the board. New research says that this avoidance may be unwarranted because CRMs actually outperform US RMs and non-RM stocks with similar characteristics, though their absolute results don’t have much to recommend them.

CRMs did better than RMs, but neither is impressive

To track relative performance researchers matched up CRMs with control listings (CL) that had the closest market cap among stocks that traded on the same exchange (typically OTCBB or Pink Sheets),...