Fantastic work. A lot of data crunching went into this. Do the negative EV stocks on average, beat the market over the time period you would have invested? For example, is it just that after the 2008 bear market, lots of stocks were negative EV, so you would have been heavily invested for the recovery? Or do they outperform the relevant index?
Also, is there a correlation between the degree of negativity (EV/market cap) and subsequent performance? What does the scatter plot look like?