ique proposed by Brandt, Santa-Clara, and Valkanov (BSCV [2009]), Hand and
Green (2011) show that the incorporation of three accounting variables—namely,
accruals, change in earnings, and asset growth—produces significantly greater
returns than simply using the well-known Fama-French-Carhart (FFC) (Fama &
French [1993]; Carhart [1997]) factors used by BSCV (2009). They also show
that their approach outperforms simple buy-and-hold strategies proposed in the
prior accounting and finance literature. Impressively, they demonstrate that their
findings hold for out-of-sample portfolios in frictionless market settings. Unfortunately,
however, the performance of their model goes down substantially once
short sales constraints and transactions costs are introduced