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We examine two quality investing strategies using gross profitability (GP) or FSCORE, respectively, over the period of 2000–2016 in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan stock markets. We find that the high‐quality stocks generally earn positive returns in these markets. Both FSCORE and GP are significantly positively associated with subsequent stock returns in the cross‐sectional regressions. We also find that financial institutions as sophisticated investor concern about stock quality. The actively managed institutions buy significantly more high‐quality stocks than low‐quality stocks in each of five Asian markets. The trading pattern is not significant in passively managed institutions.

This paper explores whether a simple fundamental analysis strategy, FSCORE by Piotroski (2000), can discriminate between firms with strong financial strength and those with weak financial strength over the period of 2000 to 2015 in seven Pacific-Basin markets: Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Similar to Piotroski and So (2012), FSCORE can screen winners from losers in all book-to-market portfolios in most of the markets; the returns of portfolios with high FSCORE are significantly more than the returns of portfolios in the same category with low FSCORE. The portfolios that long value stocks (high book-to-market) with high FSCORE yield significantly positive risk-adjusted return. We find that FSCORE can also be applied to size portfolios. The portfolios of small cap stocks with high FSCORE give monthly risk-adjusted returns of 2.5289%, 3.3552%, 1.1081%, 1.0744%, 0.5762%, 0.9263%, and 1.7802% in Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. The predictive ability of FSCORE in screening winners from losers is stronger in small cap stocks than value stocks.