Abstract

Financially distressed stocks do not underperform healthy stocks when the entire economy is in distress. The asset beta and financial leverage of distressed stocks rise significantly after market downturns, resulting in a dramatic increase in equity beta. Hence, a long/short healthy-minus-distressed trading strategy leads to significant losses when the market rebounds. Managing this risk mitigates the severe losses of financial-distress strategies and significantly improves their Sharpe ratios. Our results remain strongly significant controlling for the momentum effect and are robust to various estimation procedures.

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