investors are misled by past growth and overlook
the nature of business competition. Industries
which are experiencing the high growth tend to
attract heavy competition by other firms. This
competitive process eventually results in lower
growth rate and lower returns. Instead, industries
with low growth rate attract less capital from
the market. Therefore, in order to survive in the
competition, management tries to achieve higher
earnings by operating more efficiently.
Surprisingly, in an investment world, several
brokerage houses do not recommend their clients
to buy high BM stocks (value stocks). Stickel (1998)
finds that analysts prefer recommending firms
with recent strong performance (low BM stocks
or growth stocks) because they anticipate high BM
stocks to continuously underperform the market in
the near future and they recognize the profits from
the strategy that depends on purchasing low BM
stocks. This is consistent to the mispricing concept
discussed by Lakonishok et al. (1994) and LaPorta
(1996).