value investing that analyzes fundamental data such as financial statement line items, economic data, and unstructured data in a rigorous and systematic manner. Practitioners often employ quantitative applications such as statistical / empirical finance or mathematical finance, behavioral finance, natural language processing, and machine learning. Quantitative investment analysis can trace its origin back to Security Analysis (book) by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd in which the authors advocated detailed analysis of objective financial metrics of specific stocks. Quantitative investing replaces much of the ad-hoc financial analysis used by human fundamental investment analysts with a systematic framework designed and programmed by a person but largely executed by a computer in order to avoid cognitive biases that lead to inferior investment decisions. In an interview, Benjamin Graham admitted that even by that time ad-hoc detailed financial analysis of single stocks was unlikely to produce good risk-adjusted returns. Instead, he advocated a rules-based approach focused on constructing a coherent portfolio based on a relatively limited set of objective fundamental financial factors. Joel Greenblatt's magic formula investing is a simple illustration of a quantitative value investing strategy. Many modern practitioners employ more sophisticated forms of quantitative analysis and evaluate numerous financial metrics as opposed to just two as in the "magic formula". James O'Shaughnessy's What Works on Wall Street is a classic guide to quantitative value investing, containing backtesting performance data of various quantitative value strategies and value factors based on compustat data from January 1927 until December 2009. Value investing performance Performance of value strategies Value investing has proven to be a successful investment strategy. There are several ways to evaluate the success. One way is to examine the performance of simple value strategies, such as buying low PE ratio stocks, low price-to-cash-flow ratio stocks, or low price-to-book ratio stocks. Numerous academics have published studies investigating the effects of buying value stocks. These studies have consistently found that value stocks outperform growth stocks and the market as a whole, not necessarily over short periods but when tracked over long periods. A review of 26 years of data (1990 to 2015) from US markets found that the over-performance of value investing was more pronounced in stocks for smaller and mid-size companies than for larger companies and recommended a "value tilt" with greater emphasis on value than growth investing in personal portfolios. Performance of value investors Simply examining the performance of the best known value