Combining equity country selection strategies

The recent increase in passive investment products has provided investors with easy access to international markets. The basic motivation of this paper is to offer new tools to investors who want to allocate assets across countries. This study investigates the performance of equity country selection strategies based on a combination of theoretically and empirically motivated variables. Thus, we create portfolios and assess their performance using asset pricing models. The empirical examination is based on data from 78 countries from 1999 to 2015. The strategies that are based on the earnings-to-price (EP) ratio, the turnover ratio, and skewness prove to be useful tools for international investors. Furthermore, portfolios from sorts on the blended rankings of skewness combined with the EP ratio or the turnover ratio are also characterized by an attractive risk-return ratio. However, joint strategies do not outperform strategies that are based on single metrics. Consequently, we argue that investors would be better off building a diversified portfolio rather than combining their options into one strategy because of the low correlation among returns on single-variable strategies.