Tax-Managed Factor Strategies

We examine the tax efficiency of an indexing strategy and six factor tilts. Between June 1995 and March 2018, average value added by tax management exceeded 1.50% per year at a 10-year horizon for all the strategies we considered. Tax-managed factor tilts that are beta 1 to the market generated average tax alpha between 1.59% and 1.89% per year, while average tax alpha for the tax-managed indexing strategy was 2.26% per year. These remarkable results depend on the availability of short-term capital gains to offset. To a great extent, they can be attributed to loss harvesting and the tax rate differential.