Consistent with Fama and French (1995) and Piotroski (2000), high BM firms earn
lower mean (median) ROA than do low BM firms. This may partly be due to the fact that
high BM portfolio consists of a vast majority of poor performing firms. Low BM firms also
grow at a much faster rate with a median annual growth at around 14.09% as opposed to high
BM firms which grow at only 4.24% annually. As expected, low BM firms have much
greater capital expenditure intensity than high BM or universe firms.
Table 1 also presents the descriptive statistics of stock returns. Low BM firms earn
mean positive market-adjusted returns (MAR) of 1.03% and 6.35% for the first and second
year, respectively while high BM firms earn 15.65% and 35.02%, respectively. Consistent
with Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny (1994), returns of high BM firms are much more
pronounced. The 25th percentile shows that low BM firms have MAR of -33.10% and -
40.98% for the one and two-year buy-and-hold strategy (-21.75% and -20.75% for high BM
firms). In both windows, medians MAR for low BM firms are negative, but positive for high
BM firms. Returns on both low and high BM firms in the 75th percentile, however, change
from negative to positive values. The result can be inferred that any strategy that can choose
which firms to end up in the two tails of the distribution and tries to reach profitable returns
from the differences is likely to produce fruitful returns. As expected, high BM firms yield
more positive proportion of returns than low BM firms.