
Since we make money when expectations change, once Twitter advertising is baked into the expectations, no premium should persist. Now that it is, people can account for it accordingly when anticipating business performance. Even ignoring the fact that personal engagement is different from traditional ads, Twitter is probably much cheaper to run for the same reach, so that increased efficiency wouldn't be fully recognized before Twitter was seen as a legitimate form of advertising. We may not even yet understand how to value it, but we will with time, just as we did with other advertising. It was hard to anticipate the relative value there, even if it seems obvious to us now. As you explained, it is a fundamentally different type of advertising vector compared to print or TV. I agree that the marketing returns won't go away, we'll just understand how to price them better. But if there continues to exist a market, just as there does for magazines, there's no reason it wouldn't continue to have value. With the rise of say, Tik Tok, perhaps Twitter becomes irrelevant. Sure, if society fundamentally changes like the demise of print media, the entire venue could become devalued in aggregate. I wouldn't expect the marketing returns of Twitter to go away anymore than I would expect the marketing returns of magazine ads to go away. But you should see the rush of brain chemicals consumers get when a corporate twitter account does something funny, sarcastic, or engages a particular consumer personally. Sure, it's not a billboard, it's not a TV advertisement. If you disagree for Cheerios, pick 1 of a thousand other name brand / generic comparisons.) Corporate Twitter accounts are often just yet another venue for developing / building / generating non-product value perception. (Assuming the product is otherwise equal. Why wouldn't you expect it to exist? There's a reason why despite store brand Cheerios showing up decades ago, the Cheerios brand still exists. In theory, before fees and transaction costs, QMOM should perform better over the very long run, but significant underperformance is possible over finite time periods (or if factors don't actually work). In contrast, QMOM is designed to look very little like the market - 50 stocks out of the largest 1000, equal weighted, so it will open have a significant mid cap bias (when larger companies beat smaller companies, this will hurt it, when the opposite is true, this will help it). MTUM is designed to look a lot like the Market, so you get less tracking error, but also less exposure to the momentum factor.


With regards to the funds you mentioned, it seems that MTUM beat the market, but QMOM did not.


You can expect the momentum factor to perform poorly over 1-10 year periods, just as the market itself can. Momentum hasn't underperformed over the long run, but very little has out performed the market over the past several years. Momentum is typically measured over 6 to 12 month timeframes, but achieving/losing a large market cap usually requires much longer than that - Amazon could go down for the best year and would still have a massive market cap. Market cap is used for size, which is different from momentum (and smaller size has historically been better).
