The opportunities for value investors are bigger than they have been for nearly 20 years, according to a portfolio manager at SEI.
Eugene Barbaneagra said growth stocks have become very expensive and that the opportunities have become greater in the value space.
Over the past five years, the MSCI World Value index has underperformed the MSCI World while the MSCI World Growth index has outperformed - but over the past three months this pattern has been flipped.
Mr Barbaneagra said interest rates were already very low, which tends to support growth stocks, and he questioned whether they would be able to go any lower.
He said: "Valuations of glamorous growth stocks are already very high. How much higher can they go? So the opportunities today in the market are clearly in the value space. In fact the value opportunity is the greatest we have seen since 2000.
"Whenever we invest in asset classes or funds or securities it is about what is the future opportunity, measurable in terms of how many dollars, how many pounds, do we pay for the unit of earnings for the next one, two or five years.
"My second recommendation is to stay diversified. That is extremely important because although we think value is extremely attractive and we are convinced over the next 10 years value will perform much better than it has done over the past 10 years and much better than growth, we don't know when the next 10 years starts. It may have started last September. It may start next February.
"One should not be betting everything on one particular approach."
Mr Barbaneagra said it would take a "much longer horizon" to establish why it is that value has started doing better - if this performance proves to be sustained.
damian.fantato@ft.com
