Investor monitoring and differences in mutual fund performance

A number of mutual funds cater exclusively to institutional investors. Although institutional funds might be a natural place to look for “smart money”, agency costs associated with delegated monitoring may lead to less monitoring and worse overall performance. We split institutional funds based on proxies for the degree of investor oversight, and we find that institutional funds with low initial investment requirements and funds with retail mates perform significantly worse than other institutional funds both before and after adjusting for risk and expenses. Tracking error is especially important in the flow-performance relationship of institutional funds with high minimum investment requirements.     

Cross-sectional learning and short-run persistence in mutual fund performance

Using monthly return data of more than 6400 US equity mutual funds we investigate short-run performance persistence over the period 1984–2003. We sort funds into rank portfolios based on past performance, and evaluate the portfolios’ out-of-sample performance. To cope with short ranking periods, we employ an empirical Bayes approach to measure past performance more efficiently. Our main finding is that when funds are sorted into decile portfolios based on 12-month ranking periods, the top decile of funds earns a statistically significant, abnormal return of 0.26 percent per month. This effect persists beyond load fees, and is mainly concentrated in relatively young, small cap/growth funds.     

Investor risk evaluation in the determination of management incentives in the mutual fund industry

This paper examines the way in which investors evaluate risk in deciding which mutual funds to invest. New fund investment is found to be positively related to a distributed lag of past fund performance with a strong degree of inertia. The relationship is mostly linear with significant nonlinearities at the upper (and possibly the lower) end of the performance spectrum. Investors appear to use publicly available data in a way that is consistent with the theory, giving equal weight in their decisions to the return and market risk components of the performance measure, while ignoring diversifiable risk. Finally, it is shown that improved performance in any year has a significant impact on the earnings of the management company. Because managers are rewarded on the basis of risk adjusted returns, risk neutral managers have no incentive to manipulate risk, except at very high performance levels.     

Survivor bias and mutual fund performance

Mutual fund attrition can create problems for a researcher becausefunds that disappear tend to do so due to poor performance.In this article we estimate the size of the bias by trackingall funds that existed at the end of 1976. When a fund mergeswe calculate the return, taking into account the merger terms.This allows a precise estimate of survivorship bias. In addition,we examine characteristics of both mutual funds that mergerand their partner funds. Estimates of survivorship bias overdifferent horizons and using different models to evaluate performanceare provided.     

Manager education and mutual fund performance

This paper examines the relationship between manager education and mutual fund performance, following Chevalier and Ellison [Chevalier, Judith, Ellison, Glenn, 1999. Are some mutual fund managers better than others? Cross-sectional patterns in behavior and performance. Journal of Finance 54, 3, 875–899]. We refine their analysis by investigating if the quality of the MBA program, as measured by the mean GMAT score and Business Week ranking, has any effect on performance. We find that the mean GMAT score of the MBA program is positively and significantly related to fund performance. Managers who hold MBAs from schools ranked in the top 30 of the Business Week rankings of MBA programs exhibit performance superior to the performance of both managers without MBA degrees and managers holding MBAs from unranked programs. We also find that other education variables, such as whether the manager attained a CFA designation or holds either a non-MBA masters-level graduate degree or Ph.D., are generally unrelated to mutual fund performance.     

Recession managers and mutual fund performance

We find that fund managers who began their careers during recessions produce superior returns. This superior performance is not unconditional, as they exhibit better market timing than their non-recession counterparts in recessions, but do not demonstrate better stock picking in booms. Exploring managers' portfolio choices across years, we find that recession managers tilt their investments towards defensive, rather than cyclical, industries during and before recession periods. Overall, our findings support the argument that the economic conditions under which an individual initially entered the labour market exert a long-term impact on her career outcomes and decision-making.     

Firm performance and mutual fund voting

We employ a new comprehensive proxy voting records database to investigate whether mutual funds consider prior firm performance when they vote on a diverse range of management- and shareholder-sponsored proposals relating to governance, compensation, and director election. We argue that prior firm performance plays a role in the monitoring effort of mutual funds as they fulfill their fiduciary duties. Results show that voting is related to prior firm performance for selected management and shareholder proposals and that it is consistent with Institutional Shareholder Services’ recommendations. Mutual funds support management (shareholder) proposals less (more) when prior firm performance has been weak. Furthermore, even when mutual funds deviate from their fund family’s voting policies, they attach importance to prior firm performance, and their voting is, to a certain degree, affected by business ties.     

Individual investor mutual fund flows

This paper studies the relation between individuals’ mutual fund flows and fund characteristics, establishing three key results. First, consistent with tax motivations, individual investors are reluctant to sell mutual funds that have appreciated in value and are willing to sell losing funds. Second, individuals pay attention to investment costs as redemption decisions are sensitive to both expense ratios and loads. Third, individuals’ fund-level inflows and outflows are sensitive to performance, but in different ways. Inflows are related only to “relative” performance, suggesting that new money chases the best performers in an objective. Outflows are related only to “absolute” fund performance, the relevant benchmark for taxes.     

Revisiting mutual fund performance evaluation

Mutual fund manager excess performance should be measured relative to their self-reported benchmark rather than the return of a passive portfolio with the same risk characteristics. Ignoring the self-reported benchmark results in different measurement of stock selection and timing components of excess performance. We revisit baseline empirical evidence fund performance evaluation utilizing stock selection and timing measures that incorporate the self-reported benchmark. We introduce a new factor exposure based approach for measuring the – static and dynamic – timing capabilities of mutual fund managers. We overall conclude that current studies are likely to be misstating skill because they ignore the managers’ self-reported benchmark in the performance evaluation process.     

Front-running of mutual fund fire-sales

We show that a real-time trading strategy which front-runs the anticipated forced sales by mutual funds experiencing extreme capital outflows generates an alpha of 0.5% per month during the 1990–2010 period. The abnormal return stems from selling pressure among stocks that are below the NYSE mean size and cannot be attributed to the arrival of public information. While the largest stocks also exhibit downward price pressure, their prices revert before the front-running strategy can detect it. The duration of the anticipated selling pressure has decreased from about a month in the 1990s to about two weeks in the most recent decade. Our results suggest that publicly available information of fund flows and holdings exposes mutual funds in distress to predatory trading.     

Active management, fund size, and bond mutual fund returns

Conventional wisdom holds that bonds are relatively homogenous investments compared to equities. Consequently, factors that explain variation in returns among bond mutual funds may differ in magnitude from those for equity mutual funds. In this study, a time-series cross-sectional analysis is employed to investigate the relationship between a bond fund's risk-adjusted return and specific fund attributes. Results indicate that a bond fund's past performance does not predict future performance and that bond fund managers are generally ineffective at increasing risk-adjusted returns. However, unlike equity mutual funds, bond mutual funds do appear to enjoy economies of scale.     

Daily mutual fund flows and redemption policies

We examine how redemption policies affect daily fund flows in open-end mutual funds. Since short-term trading of fund shares, as manifested in daily fund flows, can have an adverse impact on returns to the fund’s shareholders, mutual funds might find it desirable to discourage short-term trading through the use of redemption fees. However, if daily fund flows are due to fund shareholders’ legitimate liquidity demands, the redemption fee would have little effect on daily fund flows and possibly adversely affect fund shareholders by imposing a liquidity cost on them. We find that the likelihood of a fund charging a redemption fee is largely a function of its overall fee structure. We also use a sample of funds that imposed redemption fees to examine whether the distribution of daily fund flows changes after the initiation of the redemption fee. We find that the redemption fee is an effective tool in controlling the volatility of fund flows.     

Management team structure and mutual fund performance

We investigate the relationship between performance and portfolio management team structure of open-end mutual funds during 1997–2004. We first analyze differences in performance and risk taking between single-manager and multiple-manager mutual funds and find that the latter underperform the single-manager funds in terms of risk-adjusted returns during the 2001–2004 bear market. This underperformance is more evident among growth-oriented funds. There are no differences observed in the 1997–2000 bull market. Not all multiple-manager funds, however, are managed by pure teams. When we compare the performance of single-manager and pure-team funds we do not find any differences in performance. The underperformance of multiple-manager funds documented in previous studies comes from multiple-manager funds that employ many investment advisors and, therefore, their exact management structure is unknown. We also document differences in management structure reporting between Morningstar and CRSP.     

Analyst forecasts and European mutual fund trading

This paper addresses the questions whether European mutual fund managers rely on sell-side analyst information and whether this behavior impacts fund performance. Results show that mutual funds significantly increase (decrease) their holdings in stocks when any of the consensus forecast measures increases (decreases) within the quarter prior to the observation period. Furthermore, mutual fund managers primarily attribute high information value to consensus forecast revisions that contain positive information, that are based on a sufficiently high number of inputs, and with more unanimous inputs to the consensus. Finally, following sell-side research seems to be beneficial for mutual fund managers since our results show that stock trades that are in line with analyst forecast revisions significantly outperform trades that are contrary to analyst research.     

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.     

Behavioral biases of mutual fund investors

We examine the effect of behavioral biases on the mutual fund choices of a large sample of US discount brokerage investors using new measures of attention to news, tax awareness, and fund-level familiarity bias, in addition to behavioral and demographic characteristics of earlier studies. Behaviorally biased investors typically make poor decisions about fund style and expenses, trading frequency, and timing, resulting in poor performance. Furthermore, trend chasing appears related to behavioral biases, rather than to rationally inferring managerial skill from past performance. Factor analysis suggests that biased investors often conform to stereotypes that can be characterized as Gambler, Smart, Overconfident, Narrow Framer, and Mature.     

Convenience in the mutual fund industry

I examine the role of convenience in the mutual fund industry. I find that investors pay more for relatively convenient funds, and that the flows to convenient funds are less responsive to performance. These findings suggest that investors do not evaluate mutual funds independently, but rather that investors select a primary fund, likely based on beliefs about managerial ability, and then select funds which are relatively convenient to this primary fund.     

Australian equity mutual fund size effects

Berk and Green propose a model of a superannuation fund industry, with a limited population of superior fund managers and a competitive investor market. In this market, superior fund managers capture the value they generate, leaving investors with a normal return on their investment. Furthermore, it is argued that previous period returns, age of the fund and management costs explain variation in net cash flow paid into a fund over time. The Berk and Green predictions find some support in empirical tests, reported in the present paper, based on Australian Morningstar retail and wholesale equity fund data over the period 1995–2005.     

Explaining persistence in mutual fund performance

This study investigates the determinants of persistence in mutual fund performance. Previous research that uses factor-mimicking portfolios and characteristic benchmarks to model fund performance fails to explain all the persistence in fund returns. This study employs a model that directly relates mutual fund returns to the characteristics of the stocks held by funds. Adjusting fund returns for the size of the stocks in which funds invest and financial ratios intended to capture fund manager investment styles explains all the persistence in mutual fund returns from 1976–1985, the period in which persistence is most prevalent.     

A meta-analysis of mutual fund performance

The purpose of this article is to introduce the statistical technique of meta-analysis of regression results using as our example the Lee and Rahmann (1990) study of the performance of 93 mutual funds. Specifically, we derive and estimate the meta-analysis formulas, explicitly adjusted for correlated regression residuals, which quantify the effect of sampling error on their reported regression results. Our analysis of selectivity reveals some real variation around a mean risk-adjusted excess return of about 1% per year; while our analysis of market timing reveals some real variation around a negative mean value and confirms that the correction for heteroscedasticity does make a difference. An examination of the 80% probability interval for the mean selectivity value indicates that the best mutual funds can deliver substantial risk-adjusted excess returns.