Tactical allocation in falling stocks: Combining momentum and solvency ratio signals

We identified 4500 US stocks with year ending losses of 50 percent or more during the 2001-2011 period. We screened our "falling knives" for financial strength to promote a greater likelihood of recovery and minimize any survivorship bias. We added the constraints of Altman Z-Scores, debt/equity ratio, and current ratio to our data set. We use GARCH-in-mean model to control the risk of the strategies. The results show consistent improvement of risk-standardized return profiles of the strategies in comparison with buy and hold strategy.