doi:10.1016/j.irfa.2018.01.007engZaremba, AdamAndreu Sánchez, LauraPaper profits or real money? Trading costs and stock market anomalies in country ETFsART-2018-104451Are the quantitative equity strategies for country selection robust to implementation costs? To answer this question, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the country-level strategies so far. We review, classify, and replicate 120 equity anomalies within a sample of 42 country equity indices for the years 1996–2017. Next, using ETF price and spread data, we test the effect of real-life conditions and trading costs on the anomaly performance. We also examine three cost-mitigation strategies: infrequent rebalancing, capitalization-based weighting, and focus on low-cost securities. We find that 46% of the long-only monthly rebalanced anomaly portfolios display significant alphas, concentrated strongly among strategies based on value, momentum, and liquidity. The effect of transaction costs proves largely lethal to returns, leaving only a handful of anomalies profitable. Less frequent rebalancing (annually) helps to regain the effectiveness of the strategies, increasing the monthly alphas on the long-only anomaly portfolios to 0.44% on average.2018http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/13094510.1016/j.irfa.2018.01.007http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/130945oai:zaguan.unizar.es:130945International review of financial analysis 56 (2018), 181-192All rights reservedhttp://www.europeana.eu/rights/rr-f/info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess