Analysing the performance of managed funds using the wavelet multiscaling method

We propose a new approach for investigating the performance of managed funds using wavelet analysis and apply it to an Australian dataset. This method, applied to a multihorizon Sharpe ratio, shows that the wavelet variance at the short scale is higher than that of the longer scale, implying that an investor with a short investment horizon has to respond to every fluctuation in the realized returns, while for an investor with a much longer horizon, the long-run risk associated with unknown expected returns is not as important as the short-run risk. Using multihorizon Sharpe ratios of six groups of managed funds, we find that none of the fund groups are dominant over all time scales.

Performance hypothesis testing with the Sharpe ratio: The case of hedge funds

As recent research highlights that the Sharpe ratio has a decision theoretic foundation even in the case of asymmetric or fat-tailed excess returns and thus is adequate even for the evaluation of hedge funds, this note provides the first Sharpe ratio based performance analysis of the hedge fund market. Furthermore, it addresses the important practical question whether the choice of hypothesis test used to statistically compare Sharpe ratios can influence an investor’s hedge fund selection process. Our key findings are as follows: (i) Only a small fraction of hedge funds in our large dataset can significantly outperform passive investments in corresponding hedge fund indices. (ii) Especially in the presence of autocorrelated or skewed excess returns, the traditional test of Jobson and Korkie, 1981, Memmel, 2003 tends to overstate the number of significant outperformers and thus provides potentially misleading information for investors. Decision makers are advised to use the bootstrap test of Ledoit and Wolf (2008) allowing robust and more reliable inference.     

L-performance with an application to hedge funds

This paper introduces a new parametric fund performance measure, called the L-performance. The L-performance is an alternative to the Sharpe performance, which is commonly used in practice despite its inability to account for skewness and heavy tails of unconditional return distributions. The L-performance improves upon the Sharpe measure in this respect. Technically, it resembles the Sharpe measure in that it is defined as a ratio of the first- and second-order moments, which are the trimmed L-moments instead of the conventional (power) moments. The trimming parameters allow for focusing the L-performance on specific risk levels of interest, according to financial risk criteria. For illustration, a set of L-performances is computed for a variety of hedge funds. The empirical study shows the use of L-performance for fund ranking and return smoothing (manipulation) control.     

Trends and determinants of Australian managed fund transaction costs

The present paper examines the often-overlooked managed fund fee that is incurred when investors enter and exit managed fund products. The present paper documents that transaction costs for investors, measured by the application-redemption spread, are above stock market brokerage rates although they have declined since 1995. The study analyses the relationship between this transaction fee and several variables. In summary, retail fund transaction costs are positively related to retail funds’ assets under management, whilst this relationship is negative for larger wholesale funds, consistent with economies of scale. Direct entry and exit fees and initial commissions are positively related to transaction costs which raises the possibility that the commissions are used to levy soft-dollar payments. The paper also documents a relationship between transaction costs and fund flows which differs between retail and wholesale funds. Overall, the findings are consistent with the proposition that the various fees are used by managers as interchangeable and the different fee regimes reflect different products and markets.     

An Empirical Examination of U.K. International Unit Trust Performance

We examine the performance of U.K. unit trusts with international equity objectives between January 1985 and December 2000 using four international factor models. The international version of the Carhart (1997) model performs the best in explaining the cross-section of international stock returns. There is little evidence of superior performance by international trusts relative to the global models. We also find that the choice between a local and global version of the Carhart model has a significant impact on the relation between the investment sector of the trust and performance.JEL classification: G10, G12     

金融危机背景下基金家族绩效与风险关系研究——基于面板数据模型的实证分析

以中国基金市场32家基金管理公司旗下的103只开放式偏股型基金作为样本,选择恰当的面板数据模型形式,分别建立金融危机之前、危机期间和危机之后三个时期基金家族绩效与风险关系模型,以剖析不同经济形势下两者之间的关系。结果表明,金融危机之前和危机期间基金家族绩效与风险显著负相关,而危机之后两者关系不显著,在金融危机期间和危机之后基金业绩效状况持续恶化,危机之后基金业整体风险水平降低;金融危机后,为弥补金融危机中造成的损失,各基金家族倾向于采取"打造明星基金"的投资策略以充分利用有限资源、提升家族整体绩效。     

A model of emulation funds

Emulation funds are a potentially cost‐effective way for multimanager funds to improve their investment performance by delaying and netting trade signals from underlying managers. We develop a model to represent the expected sources of differential performance in an emulation fund relative to its underlying multimanager portfolio. The model formalises the expected interaction between potential savings and opportunity costs and allows us to observe complexities in the emulation process that are hidden without a benchmark. Finally, the functional representation of the model allows sensitivity analysis of the emulation fund to key parameters and enables us to determine theoretically optimal lag periods.     

U.K. Unit Trust Performance: Does it Matter Which Benchmark or Measure is Used?

We explore the validity of different benchmark specifications used to evaluate U.K. fund performance, and we examine the sensitivity of U.K. unit trust performance to the factor benchmark specification and two performance measures. Our findings suggest that the different benchmark specifications create some bias when we evaluate U.K. fund performance with either performance measure. We find that the performance of the trusts is sensitive to the factor benchmark specification used, but not to the performance measure. We also find significant time-series variations in the abnormal performance of the trusts.     

Risk-taking and performance of government bond mutual funds

This paper investigates the risk exposures of government bond mutual funds and how risk-taking behavior affects fund performance. Government bond mutual funds often outperform their respective benchmark bond indexes before but not after adjusting for bond market risk factors. We show that the risk-taking behavior of fund managers helps to explain the different performances of government bond funds with and without controlling for the risk factors. Our results suggest that risk-taking leads to higher returns relative to benchmarks in normal risk periods but lower returns in high risk periods, suggesting that fund managers consistently take risky bets in fund management. We further show that the risk-taking of government bond funds is persistent and that investors typically have no ability to differentiate between the skill and risk components of fund performance. These findings suggest why fund managers have incentives to take consistently risky positions.     

我国基金规模对业绩及其投资行为的影响分析

本文从实证角度出发,采用面板数据分析法研究基金规模与业绩及其投资行为之间的关系。结果显示:随着基金规模的扩大,基金经理先是倾向于提高投资组合内股票的持股比例,然后才是增加股票的数目,提高投资的分散化程度。大型基金随规模变大其投资分散化程度提高较显著;而大盘股基金随规模扩大其持股比例提高的程度较显著。     

Performance persistence of closed-end funds

Studies of performance persistence of closed-end funds (CEFs) use two measures of persistence; autocorrelation and rank correlation of performance. The autocorrelation measure offers limited information because it cannot separate persistence relative to the market and to the industry. The rank correlation measure is generally applied to two periods, disregarding multi-period persistence. We investigate performance persistence of CEFs in terms of both market price return and net asset value return using contingency tables and multiple regression models. Jensen’s alpha and the Sharpe ratio are used as measures of risk-adjusted performance. We test three hypotheses: (i) CEFs performing better than the industry median will do so persistently, (ii) CEFs outperform the market persistently; and (iii) performance persistence can be partly explained by dividend yield. The findings are fivefold. First, the number of persistent years varies with the models used to calculate risk-adjusted performance. Second, with 4-index unconditional beta fixed variance model, CEFs persistently beat their industry for six out of 10 years in terms of both market price return and net asset value return. Third, with a 4-index unconditional beta fixed variance model, we find performance persistence relative to market for 6 and 7 years, out of the 10 years considered, in terms of market price return and net asset value return, respectively. Fourth, the disaggregate sample tests show that performance of municipal bond funds is more persistent than equity funds and taxable bond funds. Fifth, dividend patterns can partially explain persistence with liquidity as control.     

相对业绩差距评估对基金经理风险承担的激励研究

基金经理在选择投资组合风险时,不仅会考虑基金的业绩排名,同时会考虑基金业绩之间的差距,由此提出了业绩差距排名,并提出了新的实证方法,即线性回归的方法来研究业绩差距排名对基金经理风险承担的影响,同时验证了BHS结论在中国基金市场中的适用性。结果表明BHS结论在中国基金市场中是不成立的,同时表明在中国基金市场中基金经理具有相对业绩排名目标,但此相对业绩排名是本文中所提出的业绩差距排名,此结论可以为监管部门规范基金投资行为以及为投资者选择基金提供参考。     

Implied measures of relative fund performance

We evaluate the relative performance of funds by conditioning their returns on the cross-section of portfolio characteristics across fund managers. Our implied procedure circumvents the need to specify benchmark returns or peer funds. Instead, fund-specific benchmarks for measuring selection and market timing ability are constructed. This technique is robust to herding as well as window dressing and mitigates survivorship bias. Empirically, the conditional information contained in portfolio weights defined by industry sectors, assets, and geographical regions is important to the assessment of fund management. For each set of portfolio characteristics, we identify funds with success at either selecting securities or timing-the-market.

基金投资风格的持续性研究:原因与结果

本文以2006至2010年期间所有开放式股票型非指数型基金为样本,实证研究基金投资风格的持续性以及基金转变投资风格的原因和结果。研究发现:(1)基金的大盘/小盘风格具有一定的持续性,但是价值/成长风格不具有持续性;(2)基金总体上并没有表现出明显的风格择时能力,而过去的业绩是影响基金投资风格发现转变的一个重要原因;(3)适当地改变大盘/小盘风格、适当地保持价值/成长风格有利于提高未来的业绩。     

Análisis de portafolio por sectores mediante el uso de algoritmos genéticos: caso aplicado a la Bolsa Mexicana de Valores

The type of industry, size of company, number of employees, etc. are variables that are considered as control variables in a large number of articles. In this research we consider the sector variable as a determinant of financial performance (Baird et al. 2012) and the risk (Artikis and Nifora, 2011) rather than as a control variable. This paper analyzes six sectors of the Mexican economy divided according to the Mexican Stock Exchange: industrial, basic consumer products, materials, non basic consumer products, telecommunications and financial services. The sample consists of Mexican companies, that is, 30 companies in the 2007-2012 period. To measure portfolio performance two classic indicators are used: (1) Jensen alpha and (2) Sharpe ratio, and also conditional metrics are used that measures the number of times the portfolio return exceeds the market average. The goal is to find a portfolio that maximizes these parameters and compare the results between the different sectors under study. Due to a nonlinear programming problem, genetic algorithms are used to obtain the optimal portfolio that maximizes these metrics. The results show a better risk-adjusted financial performance in the field of materials and financial services and a lower performance in such sectors as the industrial and telecommunications ones.     

Should hedge funds be cautious reporting high returns?

In a recent article, Schuster and Auer (2012) show that fund managers with a certain positive performance need to be aware of the fact that too high prospective excess returns can lower the empirical Sharpe ratio of their funds. In this note, we investigate the empirical relevance of this effect. We analyse whether hedge funds being evaluated on the basis of the Sharpe ratio negatively influence their performance by reporting too high returns. Our results show that a economically significant number of hedge funds listed in the CISDM hedge fund database has at least once reported a high return causing this effect.     

Stochastic Dominance Analysis of iShares

Abstract

Country indices as represented by iShares exhibit non-normal return distributions with both skewness and kurtosis. Earlier studies provide procedures for determining the statistical significance of stochastic dominance measures and the Sharpe Ratio. This present study uses these refinements to compare the performance of 18 country market indices. The iShares are indistinguishable when using the Sharpe Ratio as no significant differences are found. In contrast, stochastic dominance procedures identify dominant iShares. Although the results vary over time, stochastic dominance appears to be both more robust and discriminating than the CAPM in the ranking of the iShares.     

What do mutual fund managers’ private portfolios tell us about their skills?

I study a registry-based dataset of Swedish mutual fund managers’ personal portfolios. The majority of managers do not invest personal wealth into the very same funds they professionally manage. The managers who do invest personal money into their funds subsequently outperform the managers who do not. The results suggest that fund managers, in contrast to regular investors, are certain about their ability to generate an abnormal return, or lack thereof, and invest their personal wealth accordingly.     

Performance aspects of Greek bond mutual funds

This paper examines the performance characteristics of Greek bond funds and the impact of fund flows on portfolio returns. The evidence shows that on average bond funds do not offer risk-adjusted profits exceeding the returns of the benchmark index, which is in consistence with the US and international evidence. Returns before fees are slightly superior to the returns of the benchmark index, but when fees are considered they lag considerably. The security selection and market timing skills of fund managers are also tested using both an unconditional and a conditional model to test for the impact of public information variables. We also find that fund flows impact negatively on market timing.