Patent predictive price-to-book ratio (PB) on improving investment performance -- Evidence in China

Patent is strongly meaningful for most countries’ technology development and economy growth. China is the world largest patent application country and has the world No.2 stock market. In this research, China listed companies (A-shares) in Shanghai main board, Shenzhen main board, GE board, and SME board from 2016 to 2018 were applied to discuss the prediction ability of patent indicators to financial performance. The patent prediction equations for quantitatively predicting the price-to-book ratio (PB) by patent indicators were constructed via Granger Causality test and time series regression. The stock selection criteria based on the patent predictive PB were further discussed. The traditional value investors consider stocks with PB values under 3.0 are undervalued. It was found that most stock portfolios selected by either the lower predictive PB or the higher predictive PB growth rate had higher performance above the traditional PB investment strategy. The criteria also worked well on GE board and SME board even though these stock boards were seriously impacted to decline by the China-US trade conflict. Though the overall economic environment fluctuated, the patent prediction algorithm proposed was proved to be useful to discover good stock portfolios and improve traditional PB investment strategy