Value Investing: Circle of Competence in the Thai Insurance Industry

This study explores the strategy of value investing, specifically for the insurance industry in Thailand. It employs multiple measures of "value," suitable for insurance companies, such as the price-to-earning (PE), price-to-book (PB), and cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings (CAPE). Value premium exists in the Thai insurance industry. Most of the value portfolios constructed from these measures significantly outperform the market, even when adjusting for price volatility and portfolio's $\beta$. The cumulative returns are also higher for the value stocks, when compared to the growth stocks, and the Thai stock market. Constructing a value portfolio, using the PE ratio, results in the highest returns and are far better than PB and CAPE. The value anomaly cannot be fully explained by either the capital asset pricing model or the Fama-French 3 factor models.