Portfolio selection, diversification and fund-of-funds: a note

The present paper examines the performance and diversification properties of active Australian equity fund‐of‐funds (FoF). Simulation analysis is employed to examine portfolio performance as a function of the number of funds in the portfolio. The present paper finds that as the number of funds in an FoF portfolio increases, performance improves in a mean–variance setting; however, measures of skewness and kurtosis behave less favourably given an investor's preferences for the higher moments of the return distribution. The majority of diversification benefits are realized when a portfolio of approximately 6 active equity funds are included in the FoF portfolio.