Trailing performance has not exactly been a selling point for value investment strategies in recent memory. As the last 15 years unfolded, a wave of bad performance has seen allocators shift remorselessly away from the strategy of investing primarily at undervalued companies to more growth-orientated approaches.
This has hollowed out the value investing community. As far as I can tell, the universe of value managers has shrunk to the aged whose records pre-2009 are strong enough to keep investors loyal, quants who trust the long-term data and cranks who are weirdly obsessed with natural resources stocks.
The recovery from the Covid pandemic now seems like a false dawn for the value community in the US, as artificial intelligence-mania swept the market in 2023 restoring the fortunes of the briefly embarrassed growth managers and punishing the briefly optimistic value managers.