Spinoff portfolio beats the S&P 500

Article Excerpt

One of the reasons we like spinoffs so much is that academic studies often show that both the parent and the new company created by the spinoff generally do better than comparable firms for at least several years after the split takes place. For example, a recent study by Mohnish Pabrai (the managing partner of the Pabrai Investment Funds—a family of hedge funds) examined the performance of a portfolio of five spinoff stocks against the S&P 500 Index. Each spinoff company in the portfolio must be between one and seven years old, and meet other criteria. Those include having a market cap of at least $100 million and positive net income for every year as an separate firm. The list of stocks is refreshed and rebalanced each year on December 31. The study showed that the spinoff portfolio had a total return of 798.2% (or an annualized average return of 13.1%) for the period between 2000 and November 2017. That’s significantly better than…