This article tests Piotroski and So’s (2012) market expectation errors approach to value-growth investing in European equity markets. As in the USA, European value-growth returns are concentrated among firms with existent market expectation errors, but absent among firms without such errors which can be ex ante identified by interacting book-to-market with FSCORE, an accounting-based measure of the firm’s fundamental strength. The returns to an expectation errors-based value-growth strategy are highly persistent for up to three years after portfolio formation, pervasive among large firms, and cannot be explained by common risk factors. However, consistent with a mispricing-based interpretation, prior external financing activities significantly influence these market expectation errors. A financing-based misvaluation factor can explain the return behavior of value-growth strategies formed along market expectations errors.

This paper extends the U.S. evidence in Bali et al. (2010) to European stock markets. Like in the United States, European value-growth returns are strongly dependent on the valuation signals contained in the firm’s equity financing activities. The high returns of value firms are due to value purchasers, while the low returns of growth firms are due to growth issuers. Among value issuers and growth purchasers, there exists no value premium at all. The large return difference between value purchasers and growth issuers cannot be explained by common risk factors. However, employing Piotroski and So’s (2012) recently proposed market expectation errors approach shows that the observed value-growth returns can be attributed to mispricing.

The maximum daily return over the previous month (MAX) of Bali et al. (2011) is a strong and significant predictor of future stock returns in non-U.S. equity markets. Once it is controlled for MAX in the cross-section of average returns, the puzzling negative idiosyncratic volatility-return relation disappears. Consistent with the assumption that MAX is the true effect, for which idiosyncratic volatility is just a proxy, we find that MAX can be traced back to firm fundamentals in the manner of idiosyncratic volatility. The negative MAX-return relation is stronger among firms with high cash flow volatility and weaker among firms with high profitability.