Stock Investment: The p-index Approach

Abstract: This paper has used European put option to construct the p-index risk measure to evaluate the performance of different investment strategies in China's SSE 50 index and the US SP500 index during 2018-2023. The p-index measures the insurance fee for each insured dollar to guarantee that the asset achieves at least a delta rate of return on a specified future date. It is found that with the fair price strategy, one-week and one-month holding periods can earn more, and among seven economic sectors, materials sector stocks generated highest annualized rates of return: 11.04% (one-week period), 11.93% (two-week period) and 10.18% (one-month period). With momentum and contrarian strategies of one-week holding period, the p-ratio-efficient-contrarian strategy produced the highest annualized rate of return (9.97%), followed by the p-index-inefficient-momentum strategy (9.01%) and the p-index-efficient-contrarian strategy (6.48%), the MCIRS method employing the p-index consistently delivered higher returns than its beta-based approach, and efficient (outperforming) stocks failed to sustain their momentum while inefficient (underperforming) stocks exhibited no mean reversion. It is also found that the p-index-efficient-contrarian strategy outperformed in low-sentiment (low-volume) regimes, while the p-index-inefficient-momentum strategy outperformed during high-sentiment (high-volume) periods. For the five hundred stocks of the US S&P 500 index during 2018-2023, it is found that efficient stocks sustained their momentum while inefficient stocks exhibited mean reversion. The p-index-efficient-momentum strategy produced the highest annualized rate of return (3.69%), followed by the p-ratio-inefficient-contrarian strategy (3.67%) and the beta-efficient-momentum strategy (3.48%).