Dynamic preferences for popular investment strategies in pension funds

In this paper, we characterize dynamic investment strategies that are consistent with the expected utility setting and more generally with the forward utility setting. Two popular dynamic strategies in the pension funds industry are used to illustrate our results: a constant proportion portfolio insurance (CPPI) strategy and a life-cycle strategy. For the CPPI strategy, we are able to infer preferences of the pension fund’s manager from her investment strategy, and to exhibit the specific expected utility maximization that makes this strategy optimal at any given time horizon. In the Black–Scholes market with deterministic parameters, we are able to show that traditional life-cycle funds are not optimal to any expected utility maximizers. We also prove that a CPPI strategy is optimal for a fund manager with HARA utility function, while an investor with a SAHARA utility function will choose a time-decreasing allocation to risky assets in the same spirit as the life-cycle funds strategy. Finally, we suggest how to modify these strategies if the financial market follows a more general diffusion process than in the Black–Scholes market.     

Fund manager conviction and investment performance

This paper examines the role conviction plays in asset management and its relationship with investment returns. We measure the strength of fund manager conviction through a fund's Active Share, i.e., the extent to which an investment portfolio differs from its benchmark index. First, we show fund manager conviction increases following both superior and, surprisingly, inferior past performance, and more so among solo-managed than team-managed funds. Second, and more importantly, we find an inverse-U relationship between conviction and subsequent performance. High levels of conviction proxied by high Active Share are associated with lower future returns and greater fund risk. Our study also illustrates an asymmetric investor reaction to fund manager conviction in the form of higher (lower) fund inflows rewarding good performance by high (low) conviction managers, but no pronounced penalties for poor performance, ceteris paribus.     

Reputation stretching in mutual fund starts

This study examines the role of reputation stretching in the context of mutual funds. We show that the reputation stretching strategy increases net fund inflows to new funds run by well-performing fund managers and yields a net increase of fund inflows to fund families. Reputable fund managers exhibit one-year performance persistence for managing new funds, which can help investors assess managers when selecting funds. We also find that the decrease in information asymmetry associated with managerial reputation benefits investors by leading to an increase in new fund returns in the short run, compared to those of new funds run by managers without track records. Overall, the reputation stretching strategy benefits both investors, by reducing information asymmetry and improving investment returns, and fund families, by increasing net fund inflows to new equity funds.     

What impact does a change of fund manager have on mutual fund performance?

Using a unique database of UK fund manager changes over the period from 1997 to 2011, we examine the impact of such changes on fund performance. We find clear evidence to suggest that a manager change does affect the benchmark-adjusted performance of UK mutual funds. In particular we find a significant deterioration in the benchmark-adjusted returns of funds that were top performers before the manager exit and, conversely, a significant improvement in the average benchmark-adjusted returns of funds that were poor performers before the manager exit. Our use of the Carhart's (1997) four-factor model reveals that the improvement in average post manager exit performance is accompanied by a reduction in market risk, a slight reduction in exposure to small cap stocks, and an increase in exposure to value and momentum stocks. Overall, our results suggest that UK fund management companies have been relatively successful in replacing bad managers with better managers, but relatively unsuccessful at finding equivalent replacements for their top performing managers. We believe that regulators should therefore try to ensure that all efforts are made by fund management companies to inform all of their investors about a change in management.     

Style chasing by hedge fund investors

This paper examines whether investors chase hedge fund investment styles. We find that better-performing and more popular styles are rewarded with higher inflows in subsequent periods. This indicates that investors compare hedge fund styles in terms of recent performance and popularity, and they subsequently reallocate funds from less successful to more successful styles. Furthermore, we find evidence of competition between individual hedge funds of the same style. Funds outperforming the other funds in their styles and funds whose inflows exceed the average flows in their styles experience higher inflows in subsequent periods. One of the reasons for competition among same-style funds is investors’ search for the best managers. The high minimum investment required to invest in a hedge fund limits investors’ diversification opportunities and makes this search particularly important. Finally, we show that hedge fund investors’ implementation of style chasing in combination with intra-style fund selection represents a smart strategy.     

Dynamic asset–liability management in a Markov market with stochastic cash flows

This paper provides a general model to investigate an asset–liability management (ALM) problem in a Markov regime-switching market in a multi-period mean–variance (M–V) framework. Emphasis is placed on the stochastic cash flows in both wealth and liability dynamic processes, and the optimal investment and liquidity management strategies in achieving the M–V bi-objective of terminal surplus are evaluated. In this model, not only the asset returns and liability returns, but also the cash flows depend on the stochastic market states, which are assumed to follow a discrete-time Markov chain. Adopting the dynamic programming approach, the matrix theory and the Lagrange dual principle, we obtain closed-form expressions for the efficient investment strategy. Our proposed model is examined through empirical studies of a defined contribution pension fund. In-sample results show that, given the same risk level, an ALM investor (a) starting in a bear market can expect a higher return compared to beginning in a bull market and (b) has a lower expected return when there are major cash flow problems. The effects of the investment horizon and state-switching probability on the efficient frontier are also discussed. Out-of-sample analyses show the dynamic optimal liquidity management process. An ALM investor using our model can achieve his or her surplus objective in advance and with a minimum variance close to zero.     

Management of Portfolio Depletion Risk through Optimal Life Cycle Asset Allocation

Members of defined contribution (DC) pension plans must take on additional responsibilities for their investments, compared to participants in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. The transition from DB to DC plans means that more employees are faced with these responsibilities. We explore the extent to which DC plan members can follow financial strategies that have a high chance of resulting in a retirement scenario that is fairly close to that provided by DB plans. Retirees in DC plans typically must fund spending from accumulated savings. This leads to the risk of depleting these savings, that is, portfolio depletion risk. We analyze the management of this risk through life cycle optimal dynamic asset allocation, including the accumulation and decumulation phases. We pose the asset allocation strategy as an optimal stochastic control problem. Several objective functions are tested and compared. We focus on the risk of portfolio depletion at the terminal date, using such measures as conditional value at risk (CVAR) and probability of ruin. A secondary consideration is the median terminal portfolio value. The control problem is solved using a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman formulation, based on a parametric model of the financial market. Monte Carlo simulations that use the optimal controls are presented to evaluate the performance metrics. These simulations are based on both the parametric model and bootstrap resampling of 91 years of historical data. The resampling tests suggest that target-based approaches that seek to establish a safety margin of wealth at the end of the decumulation period appear to be superior to strategies that directly attempt to minimize risk measures such as the probability of portfolio depletion or CVAR. The target-based approaches result in a reasonably close approximation to the retirement spending available in a DB plan. There is a small risk of depleting the retiree’s funds, but there is also a good chance of accumulating a buffer that can be used to manage unplanned longevity risk or left as a bequest.     

International fund investment and local market returns

International fund investment in bonds and equities is characterized by a positive association between current net inflows and contemporaneous and past market returns: positive-feedback trading, while being possibly profitable for international fund investors, could be destabilizing for the underlying markets. Allowing for interactions between equity investment and bond investment, our panel vector autoregression shows that past equity returns contain useful information in forecasting equity and bond flows and that bond flows impact future equity returns positively.     

Determinants of hedge fund performance during ‘good’ and ‘bad’ economic periods

We analyse the drivers of hedge fund performance, focusing simultaneously on fund size, age, lockup period, fund strategies, business cycles and different market conditions, dealing with the omitted variable bias. We use exogenous break points and a switching Markov model to endogenously determine different market conditions. We find that HFs deliver positive alpha only during “good” times, irrespective of their fundamentals. During “bad” times, they minimise their systematic risk. Small and young funds, and those with redemption restrictions deliver higher alpha compared to their peers during “good” times. Finally, specific strategies deliver significantly negative alpha during “bad” times.     

Optimal hedging for fund and insurance managers with partially observable investment flows

All financial practitioners are working in incomplete markets full of unhedgeable risk factors. Making the situation worse, they are only equipped with imperfect information on the relevant processes. In addition to the market risk, fund and insurance managers have to be prepared for sudden and possibly contagious changes in the investment flows from their clients so that they can avoid the over- as well as under-hedging. In this work, the prices of securities, the occurrences of insured events and (possibly a network of) investment flows are used to infer their drifts and intensities by a stochastic filtering technique. We utilize the inferred information to provide the optimal hedging strategy based on the mean-variance (or quadratic) risk criterion. A BSDE approach allows a systematic derivation of the optimal strategy, which is shown to be implementable by a set of simple ODEs and standard Monte Carlo simulation. The presented framework may also be useful for manufacturers and energy firms to install an efficient overlay of dynamic hedging by financial derivatives to minimize the costs.     

Derivative use,fund flows and investment manager performance

Prior literature which examines the use of derivatives by investment managers does not discern between different types of derivative trading strategies. This study is the first to examine and gather data on a particular type of derivative trading strategy undertaken by investment managers. We examine the extent to which equity fund managers use index futures to manage fund flows and the effect this has on their alpha and market timing measures of performance. Our results show that funds that do not use derivatives exhibit lower returns and negative market timing skills when they experience fund flow. The performance of funds that use derivatives, however, is independent of investor’s liquidity demands. In fact, the unconditional performance of the average user fund is statistically equivalent to the performance of the average non-user fund conditional on zero fund flow. Our results provide evidence that derivatives can be beneficial for mutual fund holders under certain conditions.     

Optimal Control of DC Pension Plan Management under Two Incentive Schemes

Since the late 1990s, a performance fee arrangement has been approved as a managerial incentive in direction contribution (DC) pension plan management to motivate managers. However, the fact that managers may take undue risk for the larger performance fees and thus reduce members’ utility has been a subject of debate. As such, this study investigates the optimal risk-taking policies of DC pension fund managers under both the single management fee scheme and a mixed scheme with a lower management fee, as well as an additional performance fee. The analytical solutions are derived by using the duality method and concavification techniques in a singular optimization problem. The results show the complex risk-taking structures of fund managers and recognize the win-win situation of implementing performance-based incentives in DC pension plan management. Under the setting of geometric Brownian motion asset price dynamics and constant relative risk aversion utility, the optimal risk investment proportion shows a peak-valley pattern under the mixed scheme. Further, the manager gambles for gain when fund wealth is low and time to maturity is short. As opposed to the existing literature, this study found that the risk-taking policy is more conservative when fund wealth is relatively large. Furthermore, the utilities of the manager and members could both be improved by appropriately choosing the performance fee rate.     

Life Annuity Insurance Versus Self-Annuitization: An Analysis From the Perspective of the Family

When comparing investment in an immediate life annuity with a payout-equivalent investment fund decumulation plan (self-annuitization), previous research focused on shortfall probabilities of self-annuitization. Chances of self-annuitization (i.e., bequests) typically have not been addressed. We argue that heirs might be willing to bear the shortfall risk of the retiree's self-annuitization since they might benefit from a bequest. Our article proposes a "family strategy" in which heirs receive the remaining investment fund on the retiree's death, but are obliged to finance the retiree if the fund becomes exhausted. We estimate the chance and risk profile of this "family strategy" from the heirs' perspective using German capital and annuity market data. We show that in many cases, our "family strategy" offers enormous chance potential with low shortfall risk. Finally, we discuss some limitations of the proposed "family strategy" when putting the concept into practice.     

When fund management skill is more valuable?

Does fund management skill allow managers to identify mispriced securities more accurately and thereby make better portfolio choices resulting in superior fund performance when noise trading – a natural setting to detect skill – is more prevalent? We find skilled fund managers with superior past performance to generate persistent excess risk‐adjusted returns and experience significant capital inflows, especially in high sentiment times, high stock dispersion, and economic expansion states when price signals are noisier. This pattern persists after we control for lucky bias, using the ‘false discovery rate’ approach, which permits disentangling manager ‘skill’ from ‘luck.’     

Financial consequences of mutual fund mergers

This study examines the impact of mutual fund mergers on performance and investment flows of target and acquiring funds. Results indicate some improvements in the post-merger performance for target funds shareholders. Results also confirm prior evidence of negative net asset flows in target funds in the pre-merger period as well as negative, but not significant, net asset flows in the years following the merger. However, a more detailed analysis allows us to observe that this lack of significance in the negative reaction of investors to mutual fund mergers is explained by the compensation of abnormally high inflows and outflows in the resultant funds. These substantial flows are significantly above the average in their market segment, especially regarding money flows. This finding provides evidence that investors pay attention to mutual fund mergers, especially institutional investors who are concentrated on the market possibilities resulting from these organizational processes.     

Time-varying fund manager skills of socially responsible investing (SRI) funds in developed and emerging markets

We examine stock selectivity and timing abilities in the market-wide return, volatility and liquidity of SRI fund managers. We find that multi-dimensional fund manager skills are time-varying and persistent in the short run, with developed market funds exhibiting longer persistence in all dimensions. Fund manager skills tend to be affected by fund characteristics (i.e., expense ratio, fund size, turnover and management tenure) and market characteristics (i.e., ESG market capitalization, mandatory ESG regulation and 10–2 yield spread). Fund managers of developed (emerging) market funds outperform (underperform) the market indices. For both fund types, fund managers possess exceptional volatility and liquidity timing despite poor return timing. Moreover, fund managers focus more (less) on timing the market’s return and less (more) on picking stocks when the prospect of recession keeps increasing (decreasing). Interestingly, if fund managers attempt to time the market-wide return or liquidity, stock selectivity will be worsened by their timing behavior.     

A review of behavioural and management effects in mutual fund performance

This paper surveys and critically evaluates the literature on the role of management effects and fund characteristics in mutual fund performance. First, a brief overview of performance measures is provided. Second, empirical findings on the predictive power of fund characteristics in explaining future returns are discussed. Third, the paper reviews the literature on fund manager behavioural biases and the impact these have on risk taking and returns. Finally, the impact of organizational structure, governance and strategy on both fund risk taking and future performance is examined. While a number of surveys on mutual fund performance are available, these have not focused on the role of manager behavioural biases, manager characteristics and fund management strategic behavior on fund performance and risk taking. This review is an attempt to fill this gap. Empirical results indicate that finding successful funds ex-ante is extremely difficult, if not impossible. In contrast, there is strong evidence that poor performance persists for many of the prior “loser fractile” portfolios of funds. A number of manager behavioural biases are prevalent in the mutual fund industry and they generally detract from returns.     

Indirect Incentives of Hedge Fund Managers

Indirect incentives exist in the money management industry when good current performance increases future inflows of capital, leading to higher future fees. For the average hedge fund, indirect incentives are at least 1.4 times as large as direct incentives from incentive fees and managers’ personal stakes in the fund. Combining direct and indirect incentives, manager wealth increases by at least $0.39 for a $1 increase in investor wealth. Younger and more scalable hedge funds have stronger flow‐performance relations, leading to stronger indirect incentives. These results have a number of implications for our understanding of incentives in the asset management industry.     

Evolution of a mutual fund market: Empirical analysis of simultaneous growth and decline by fund category in Indonesia

The mutual fund literature traditionally deals with the growth and decline of the funds management industry in a uni-dimensional, single equation framework. Numerous studies treat mutual fund starts, terminations, inflows, and outflows as independent phenomena. This paper investigates the role of the interdependence between mutual fund inflows and outflows and their determinants in the growth of the emerging Indonesian managed funds market. We find significant replacement and displacement effects between the outflows and inflows of fixed income, equity, and mixed funds. The evidence suggests studies of the development of mutual fund markets should take into account simultaneity between the expansion and declining of different fund categories.     

Optimal investment-reinsurance with dynamic risk constraint and regime switching

We study an optimal investment–reinsurance problem for an insurer who faces dynamic risk constraint in a Markovian regime-switching environment. The goal of the insurer is to maximize the expected utility of terminal wealth. Here the dynamic risk constraint is described by the maximal conditional Value at Risk over different economic states. The rationale is to provide a prudent investment–reinsurance strategy by taking into account the worst case scenario over different economic states. Using the dynamic programming approach, we obtain an analytical solution of the problem when the insurance business is modeled by either the classical Cramer–Lundberg model or its diffusion approximation. We document some important qualitative behaviors of the optimal investment–reinsurance strategies and investigate the impacts of switching regimes and risk constraint on the optimal strategies.