Persistence in Portuguese mutual fund performance

Recent evidence suggests that future performance is predictable from past performance, that is, funds with superior (inferior) performance in the past are likely to remain good (bad) performers in the future. This research addresses the persistence of mutual fund performance in a European regional market (the Portuguese equity fund market). Some of the problems in evaluating fund persistence are identified in the context of limited sample size and using the peer group median as a benchmark for contingency table analysis of performance persistence. The criteria for assessing performance persistence based on the contingency table methodology of repeated winners and losers are presented in terms of significance statistics, adjusted for small sample bias. The adjustments are accomplished through the Yates continuity correction and Fisher's exact p-value. The appropriateness of each criteria under different circumstances is also discussed. The analysis of the returns of all Portuguese domestic equity funds, since a representative number was established, shows some performance persistence (on a quarterly basis). The persistence, however, is reduced when the returns are controlled for the various dimensions of risk. Significant risk persistence has been documented. Furthermore, for more or less frequent intervals of measurement, the industry persistence is rejected, although individual funds exhibit superior/inferior performance.     

Persistent performance in the mutual fund market: Tests with funds and investment advisers

Recent studies of mutual funds have concluded that there is some evidence of superior performance. We test for the existence of superior performance and its persistence with mutual funds and mutual fund investment advisers on a data set of monthly returns from 1979 to 1989 for 1,387 mutual funds grouped by 243 advisers. We find no evidence of superior performance or its persistence but we do find significant evidence of persistence of inferior performance. Consistent with previous studies our findings depend on the benchmark chosen, with multiple benchmarks producing a larger degree of inferior performance.     

Synthetic hedge funds

We provide evidence on the performance and the replication success of a broad sample of 72 synthetic hedge funds from January 2009 to December 2013. Thereby, we assign the term “synthetic hedge fund” to mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with hedge fund indices as their benchmarks. Replication success is measured through different perspectives from distributional characteristics to risk-adjusted performance. We find an overall significant underperformance of synthetic hedge funds compared to an appropriate benchmark index. Furthermore, mutual funds (associated with active portfolio management) can produce return characteristics closer to hedge fund benchmarks than exchange-traded funds (associated with passive management) can. From a single strategy perspective, we find a picture of heterogeneity. Regarding the market environment, we show larger return differences for unusual market conditions than for regular ones.     

Mutual fund characteristics, managerial attributes, and fund performance

This study provides a comprehensive examination of recent mutual fund performance by analyzing a large set of both mutual funds and fund attributes in an effort to link performance to fund-specific characteristics. The results indicate that the hypothesized relationships between performance and the explanatory variables are generally upheld. After taking into consideration general market conditions and fund investment objective, the characteristic variables that relate to fund popularity, growth, cost, and management also explain performance. Finally, after controlling for survivorship and benchmark error as well as fund-specific factors, the results refute the performance persistence phenomenon.     

European Mutual Fund Performance

This paper presents an overview of the European mutual fund industry and investigates mutual fund performance using a survivorship bias controlled sample of 506 funds from the five most important mutual fund countries. The latter is done using the Carhart (1997) 4-factor asset-pricing model. In addition we investigate whether European fund managers exhibit 'hot hands', persistence in performance. Finally the influence of fund characteristics on risk-adjusted performance is considered. Our overall results suggest that European mutual funds, and especially small cap funds are able to add value, as indicated by their positive after cost alphas. If we add back management fees, four out of five countries exhibit significant out-performance at an aggregate level. Finally, we detect strong persistence in mean returns for funds investing in the UK. Our results deviate from most US studies that argue mutual funds under-perform the market by the amount of expenses they charge.     

Portfolio concentration and fund manager performance

This research examines the relationships among portfolio concentration, fund manager skills, and fund performance in Taiwan's equity mutual fund industry, yielding several empirical findings as follows. First, after controlling for other factors, concentrated equity funds tend to have smaller net asset values, larger fund flows, higher turnover rates, and a younger age and prevail in smaller fund families. Second, concentrated fund managers buy and sell stocks more smartly based on economic trends or market factors than do diversified fund managers, i.e., they have better market‐timing abilities. Third, only partial evidence supports the premise that concentrated equity funds have better next‐quarter risk‐adjusted performances than do diversified ones, as these fund managers' skills positively correlate to risk‐adjusted fund performance. Fourth, fund managers who have better stock‐picking abilities and intensively invest in certain industries generally exhibit better Carhart's alpha in the next quarter than do other fund managers. Fifth, fund managers' stock‐picking abilities more closely relate to long‐term performance than do their market‐timing abilities. Lastly, positive performance persistence is much stronger than negative performance persistence, but concentrated funds do not have stronger performance persistence than do diversified funds.     

UK equity mutual fund alphas make a comeback

In this study, we re-visit the performance of 887 active UK equity mutual funds using a new approach proposed by Angelidis, Giamouridis, and Tessaromatis. The authors argue that mutual funds stock selection is driven by the benchmark index, so if the benchmark generates alpha, there will be a bias in interpretation of manager's stock-picking ability. In their model, the alpha of a fund is adjusted by the benchmark's alpha. By applying this method, we eliminate bias inflicted by the persistently negative alphas of FTSE 100 Index in the period 1992–2013. We find that adjusted Fama–French and Carhat alphas of UK equity mutual funds are higher than those implied by the standard three- and four-factor models and are overall positive, contrary to most of the existing literature on UK fund performance. This result is consistent across funds' investment styles and robust to the use of FTSE Small Cap as benchmark for a sub-sample of small cap funds.     

The Market Timing Ability of UK Mutual Funds

Abstract:  We apply a recent nonparametric methodology to test the market timing skills of UK equity and balanced mutual funds. The methodology has a number of advantages over the widely used regression based tests of Treynor-Mazuy (1966) and Henriksson-Merton (1981) . We find a relatively small number of funds (around 1%) demonstrate positive market timing ability at a 5% significance level while around 19% of funds exhibit negative timing and on average funds miss-time the market. However, controlling for publicly available information we find very little evidence of market timing ability based on private timing signals. In terms of investment styles, there are a small number of successful positive market timers amongst Equity Income and 'All Company' funds but not among either Small Stock funds or Balanced funds, although a few small stock funds are found to time a small stock index rather than a broad market index.     

International evidence on ethical mutual fund performance and investment style

Using an international database containing 103 German, UK and US ethical mutual funds we review and extend previous research on ethical mutual fund performance. By applying a Carhart multi-factor model [Carhart, Journal of Finance 57 (1997) 57] we overcome the benchmark problem most prior ethical studies suffered from. After controlling for investment style, we find no evidence of significant differences in risk-adjusted returns between ethical and conventional funds for the 1990–2001 period. Our results also suggest that ethical mutual funds underwent a catching up phase, before delivering financial returns similar to those of conventional mutual funds. Finally, our performance estimates are robust to the inclusion of ethical indexes, which, surprisingly, are not incrementally capable of explaining ethical mutual fund return variation.     

A minimum variance benchmark to measure the performance of pension funds in Mexico

We propose the use of the minimum variance portfolio as weighting method in a strategy benchmark for pension funds performance in Mexico. By performing three discrete event simulations with daily data from January 2002 to May 2013, we test this benchmark's weighting method against the Max Sharpe ratio one and a linear combination of both benchmarks (minimum variance and Max Sharpe). With the Sharpe ratio, the Jensen's alpha significance test and the Huberman and Kandel’ (1987) spanning test, we found that the three benchmarks have a statistically equal performance. By using Bailey's (1992) risk exposure, market representativeness and turnover benchmark quality criteria, we found that the min variance is preferable for the publicly traded Mexican defined contribution pension funds.     

The Performance Persistence of Closed-End Funds

The purpose of this study is to extend the research on mutual fund performance persistence to net asset value and market price performance of domestic closed‐end funds. While research has assessed the performance persistence of open‐end mutual funds, it has not assessed the performance persistence of closed‐end funds. Yet, the unique characteristics of closed‐end funds allow stronger arguments for their persistence than the arguments previously submitted for open‐end mutual funds. The results show evidence for risk‐adjusted performance persistence.     

Benchmark Invariancy,Seasonality and APM-Free Portfolio Performance Measures

The Jobson-Korkie (1981) Z score and the positive period weighting (PPW) score of Grinblatt and Titman (1989) are applied to various benchmarks of market and mimicking portfolios to study the benchmark invariancy problem. Significantly different portfolio performance inferences are found for a sample of 146 equity mutual funds depending on the mean-variance efficiency of the portfolio benchmarks (mimicking portfolios versus market indices). Portfolio performance inferences are affected significantly by the number of factors, nonsynchronous trading adjustment, and the sizes of the firms used for factor extraction. The returns of the portfolio benchmarks exhibit significant monthly seasonalities, which, in turn, significantly influence mutual fund performance inferences.     

The Performance of Actively Managed International Mutual Funds

International mutual funds allow individual investors to diversify abroad at a reasonable cost. This paper tests whether international funds that actively engage in country and security selection outperform passive global benchmarks. We apply a mean-variance efficiency test that incorporates the practical prohibition against short sales of open-end mutual funds. Our tests reject the efficiency of the world equity market portfolio over the sample period, and our funds as a group outperform the inefficient world index. However, we find no evidence of security selectivity ability using a 12-country benchmark. We do find that active international funds provide global diversification benefits. Tests using the Positive Period Weight (PPW) measure of Grinblatt and Titman (1989), which is robust to nonlinearity in fund and benchmark returns, yield similar results.     

MUTUAL FUND PERFORMANCE PERSISTENCE AND COMPETITION: A CROSS‐SECTOR ANALYSIS

Existing work on mutual fund performance persistence obtains diverse results, depending on the group of funds studied. We examine whether performance persistence within a peer group of competing mutual funds depends on the group's composition. The U.K. mutual fund industry is ideal for such an examination because funds compete within strictly defined sectors. We consider several attributes related to the intensity of competition within a sector and use them to explain sector‐level persistence. We find robust evidence that persistence is higher in sectors where concentration of assets under management is higher.     

UK mutual fund performance: Skill or luck?

Using a comprehensive data set on (surviving and non-surviving) UK equity mutual funds, we use a cross-section bootstrap methodology to distinguish between ‘skill’ and ‘luck’ for individual funds. This methodology allows for non-normality in the idiosyncratic risk of the funds — a major issue when considering those funds which appear to be either very good or very bad performers, since these are the funds which investors are primarily interested in identifying. Our study points to the existence of stock picking ability among a relatively small number of top performing UK equity mutual funds (i.e. performance which is not solely due to good luck). At the negative end of the performance scale, our analysis strongly rejects the hypothesis that most poor performing funds are merely unlucky. Most of these funds demonstrate ‘bad skill’. Recursive estimation and Kalman ‘smoothed’ coefficients indicate temporal stability in the ex-post performance alpha's of winner and loser portfolios. We also find performance persistence amongst loser but not amongst winner funds.     

The performance of US bond mutual funds

We evaluate the performance of the US bond mutual fund industry using a comprehensive sample of bond funds over a long time period from January 1998 to February 2017. In this one study, we examine bond fund selectivity, market timing and performance persistence. We evaluate bond funds relative to their self-declared benchmarks and in terms of both gross-of-fee returns and net-of-fee returns. We document considerable abnormal performance among funds both to the fund (gross returns) and to the investor (net returns). Bond fund performance is found to be superior in the post financial crisis period. However, past strong performance cannot be relied upon to predict future performance. Finally, while some funds exhibit market timing ability; we find a predominance of negative market timing among US bond mutual funds.     

False Discoveries in UK Mutual Fund Performance

We use a multiple hypothesis testing framework to estimate the false discovery rate (FDR) amongst UK equity mutual funds. Using all funds, we find a relatively high FDR for the best funds of 32.8% (at a 5% significance level), which implies that only around 3.7% of all funds truly outperform their benchmarks. For the worst funds the FDR is relatively small at 7.6% which results in 22% of funds which truly underperform their benchmarks. For different investment styles, this pattern of very few genuine winner funds is repeated for all companies, small companies and equity income funds. Forming portfolios of funds recursively for which the FDR is controlled at a ‘acceptable’ value, produces no performance persistence for positive alpha funds and weak evidence of persistence for negative alpha funds.     

Mutual Fund Performance: Measurement and Evidence1

The paper provides a critical review of empirical findings on the performance of mutual funds, mainly for the US and UK. Ex‐post, there are around 0‐5% of top performing UK and US equity mutual funds with truly positive‐alpha performance (after fees) and around 20% of funds that have truly poor alpha performance, with about 75% of active funds which are effectively zero‐alpha funds. Key drivers of relative performance are, load fees, expenses and turnover. There is little evidence of successful market timing. Evidence suggests past winner funds persist, when rebalancing is frequent (i.e., less than one year) and when using sophisticated sorting rules (e.g., Bayesian approaches) ‐ but transactions costs (load and advisory fees) imply that economic gains to investors from winner funds may be marginal. The US evidence clearly supports the view that past loser funds remain losers. Broadly speaking results for bond mutual funds are similar to those for equity funds. Sensible advice for most investors would be to hold low cost index funds and avoid holding past ‘active’ loser funds. Only sophisticated investors should pursue an active ex‐ante investment strategy of trying to pick winners ‐ and then with much caution.     

证券投资基金业绩持续性研究综述

基金业绩持续性本质上是考察基金历史业绩是否对未来业绩有一定程度的揭示作用,其思想与有效市场假说相抵触,被视为金融市场的异常现象.本文对基金业绩持续性研究的三个主要问题--持续性是否存在、持续性的来源、持续性检验方法,做了较为全面的综述,并归纳整理了进一步的研究方向.     

Mutual fund performance evaluation with active peer benchmarks

We propose a simple approach to account for commonalities in mutual fund strategies that relies solely on information on fund returns and investment objectives. Our approach augments commonly used factor models with an additional benchmark that represents an equal investment in all same-category funds, which we call an active peer benchmark (APB). We find that APBs substantially reduce the average time series correlation of residuals between individual funds within a group when added to a four-factor equity model (or to a seven-factor fixed-income model). Importantly, adding this APB significantly improves the selection of funds with future outperformance.