Craftsmanship Alpha: An Application to Style Investing

Abstract

Successful investing requires translating sound investment concepts into actual trading strategies. The authors study many implementation details that portfolio managers should pay attention to when constructing multistyle portfolios across asset classes. The article focuses on portfolio implementation choices, including how to transform signals into portfolio weights and how to combine multiple styles, optimization, risk control, and trading. While these kinds of decisions apply to any type of investment strategy, they are particularly important in the context of style investing, where the craftsmanship choices that can impact investment success are ubiquitous. In fact, the skillful targeting and capturing of style premia may constitute a form of alpha on its own—one that the authors refer to as “craftsmanship alpha.”