This Value Investor Sees a Comeback in the Offing

Atlantic Investment Management founder Alexander Roepers thinks things are about to change for value investors, according to a recent article in Institutional Investor.

In a report published last month on his firm’s website, Roepers said that the current stock market and macroeconomic conditions signal a “rotation back to value,” and explained, “We believe we’re nearing a possible inflection point in the equity market dynamic.”

Roepers attributes the long run of growth outperformance to post-crisis monetary policy: “The zero-interest-rate policy from 2008 through 2015 fueled the search for yield that inflated valuations of many financial assets to record levels.” This, the article explained, led investors to favor passive, large-cap, ETFs and growth companies over value names. Roepers argues that this resulted in a “historically wide” valuation gap between growth and value investment strategies.

The article quotes Roeper from a recent interview, “Amazon and Netflix look very much as overvalued as some of the large-cap tech companies in 2000. When [price-earnings ratios] are this high, there’s no room for error.” He asserted that value stocks, on the other hand, are even more undervalued now then they were then, particularly in light of the interest rate environment. In his report, Roeper wrote that value stocks “have simply become too cheap to ignore, even in a less predictable macro environment.”