This paper employs DuPont analysis to decompose the return on equity into five ratios: Tax Burden, Interest Burden, Margin, Turnover, and Leverage. The predictive performance on future stock returns is evaluated using portfolio analysis and Fama-MacBeth regressions. The findings indicate that none of the popular asset pricing models successfully explain the returns of long-short portfolios sorted by leverage. Interestingly, in the Fama-MacBeth regressions, tax burden and turnover emerge as the only variables capable of capturing the expected stock returns. When adding proxies of profitability, turnover is found to have a significant impact in the regressions with operating profitability, but not with other profitability proxies.