The Profitability factor seems completely rational to me but unless I’ve bungled this somehow, I show a historical inverse relationship to profitability and return.
I used the Portfolio123’s FactSet equivalents for the Compustat factors to give me a quarterly based profitable formula without the minority factor in the denominator:
Notes on converting Compustat to P123
REVT:compustat total revenue I used Sales for REVT
COGS:Cost of Goods Sold
compustat SALE-COGS -> P123 GrossProfit
XSGA:Administrative expenses
XRD:Research and Development Expense
compustat XSGA-XRD -> P123 SGandA
XINT: Interest and Related Expense Total
-> P123 IntExp
BE: Book Equity
-> P123 BookValQ
MIB: Minority Interest, portion of net income (not parent company)-- I left this out

Final P123 Formula: (SalesQ -CostGQ -SGandAQ -IntExpQ)/BookValQ

Running a 20 year 20 bin backtest on the SP1500 results in a set of nicely declining total return bins with the lowest bin having a 13.4% annual return and the highest bin having a 5.8% return. The universe had a 10.1% return.
For such a small number of factors this does very well but in the inverse of what it supposed to be.
So did I misunderstand or misinterpret the profitability formula?

Excess vs. Benchmark Entire Period
Benchmark 10.24744
Bucket 1 3.113532 3.1% above universe
Bucket 2 3.521425
Bucket 3 2.903438
Bucket 4 1.987549
Bucket 5 -0.67059
Bucket 6 0.609326
Bucket 7 -0.10803
Bucket 8 0.740753
Bucket 9 2.175545
Bucket 10 -10.2474
Bucket 11 -10.2474
Bucket 12 -1.83211
Bucket 13 -0.27276
Bucket 14 -0.0286
Bucket 15 -0.73058
Bucket 16 -0.99633
Bucket 17 -1.86139
Bucket 18 -2.70347
Bucket 19 -1.5514
Bucket 20 -4.47536 4.5% less than universe

Mechanical Investing FAQ

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