Locating stolen phone after factory reset I assume any reasonable thief will wipe the phone as soon as possible, thus removing any tracking apps and user accounts.

I there a method to track the phone any way?

A possible method is to use a tracking app (and it's configuration) that's embedded in a custom ROM.
There are such solutions, if your device is rooted. In that case, some anti-theft apps such as Cerberus are able to integrate into the system part (ROM) of the device, so a factory-reset wouldn't help the thief.

However: As we are talking about the "clever thief", he will first grab the device, switch it off, take it into some Faraday cage before switching it on again, then boot into recovery/download mode, and flash a new ROM. Bummer. Protection gone.

So there is no 100% protection. Technically, it might be possible if it's integrated into the hardware itself – but I've never heard that such a thing was done for a consumer smartphone.