Further evidence on performance evaluation: Portfolio holdings,recommendations, and turnover costs

This paper analyzes the performance of mutual funds in Spain between January 1980 and June 1990. The robustness of results to alternative measurements and benchmarks are analyzed. The results indicate that, with monthly returns alone, it is not possible to distinguish between selectivity and timing. We are only able to measure the magnitude of total performance. To be more precise about the reasons behind performance, portfolio holdings are necessary. This work employs a new data set based on monthly portfolio holdings of a representative sample of funds. A comparison of results using monthly returns and monthly portfolio holdings is made. In particular, thanks to the availability of portfolio holdings, we are able to separate selectivity and timing. Finally, the impact of turnover costs is considered.     

The effect of estimation risk on optimal portfolio choice

This paper determines the effect of estimation risk on optimal portfolio choice under uncertainty. In most realistic problems, the parameters of return distributions are unknown and are estimated using available economic data. Traditional analysis neglects estimation risk by treating the estimated parameters as if they were the true parameters to determine the optimal choice under uncertainty. We show that for normally distributed returns and ‘non-informative’ or ‘invariant’ priors, the admissible set of portfolios taking the estimation uncertainty into account is identical to that given by traditional analysis. However, as a result of estimation risk, the optimal portfolio choice differs from that obtained by traditional analysis. For other plausible priors, the admissible set, and consequently the optimal choice, is shown to differ from that in traditional analysis.     

Potential performance and tests of portfolio efficiency

The potential performance of an asset set may be obtained by choosing the portfolio proportions to maximize the Sharpe (1966) performance measure. If a portfolio has a Sharpe measure equivalent to the potential performance of the underlying set of assets, then it is efficient. Multivariate statistical procedures for comparing potential performance and testing portfolio efficiency are developed and then evaluated using simulations. Two likelihood ratio statistics are then used to compare stock and bond indices against sets of 20 and 40 portfolios. The procedures are also compared to the Gibbons (1982) methodology for testing financial models.     

The generalized value at risk admissible set: constraint consistency and portfolio outcomes

Generalized value at risk (GVaR) adds a conditional value at risk or censored mean lower bound to the standard value at risk and considers portfolio optimization problems in the presence of both constraints. For normal distributions the censored mean is synonymous with the statistical hazard function, but this is not true for fat-tailed distributions. The latter turn out to imply much tighter bounds for the admissible portfolio set and indeed for the logistic, an upper bound for the portfolio variance that yields a simple portfolio choice rule. The choice theory in GVaR is in general not consistent with classic Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility functions for money. A re-specification is suggested to make it so that gives a clearer picture of the economic role of the respective constraints. This can be used analytically to explore the choice of portfolio hedges.     

Measuring bond mutual fund performance with portfolio characteristics

This paper studies the performance of U.S. bond mutual funds using measures constructed from a novel data set of portfolio weights. Active fund managers exhibit outperformance before costs and fees generating, on average, gross returns of 1% per annum over the benchmark portfolio constructed using past holdings (approximately the same magnitude as expenses and transaction costs combined). This suggests that fund managers are able to earn back their fees and costs. There is evidence of neutral ability to time different portfolio allocations (sector, credit quality, and portfolio maturity allocations) and only a subgroup of bond funds exhibit successful timing ability. One performance measure based on portfolio holdings predicts future fund performance and provides information not contained in the standard measures. These results provide the first evidence of the value of active management in bond mutual funds.     

A conditional asset-pricing model with the optimal orthogonal portfolio

This paper employs a conditional asset-pricing model based on the optimal orthogonal portfolio approach to construct a factor portfolio that embodies all the latent factors important for pricing a given set of test assets. The advantage of this portfolio to the anomaly related mimicking portfolios is its ability to separate out the components of average return that are not related to the return covariation. The performance of this portfolio is evaluated against several conventional factors, using both cross-sectional and time-series regression approaches, as well as the Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) distance measure. Its strong out-of-sample results indicate that our suggested methodology may have important applications in risk management, portfolio selection and performance evaluation.     

Performance ratio-based coherent risk measure and its application

Utilizing a specific acceptance set, we propose in this paper a general method to construct coherent risk measures called the generalized shortfall risk measure. Besides some existing coherent risk measures, several new types of coherent risk measures can be generated. We investigate the generalized shortfall risk measure’s desirable properties such as consistency with second-order stochastic dominance. By combining the performance evaluation with the risk control, we study in particular the performance ratio-based coherent risk (PRCR) measures, which is a sub-class of generalized shortfall risk measures. The PRCR measures are tractable and have a suitable financial interpretation. Based on the PRCR measure, we establish a portfolio selection model with transaction costs. Empirical results show that the optimal portfolio obtained under the PRCR measure performs much better than the corresponding optimal portfolio obtained under the higher moment coherent risk measure.     

Measuring fund style,performance and activity: a new style‐profiling approach

We construct new measures of fund style, performance and activity from linear combinations of off‐the‐shelf stock‐market indices. A fund's benchmark portfolio is a linear combination of two or more reference portfolios that in a least‐squares sense most closely approximates the fund's portfolio. The resulting linear combination scalar is itself a measure of fund style and the distance between a fund and its benchmark is a measure of fund activity. Our approach has a number of advantages over existing characteristic‐matching methods. We illustrate our approach using a data set of US institutional funds.     

Two-sided coherent risk measures and their application in realistic portfolio optimization

By using a different derivation scheme, a new class of two-sided coherent risk measures is constructed in this paper. Different from existing coherent risk measures, both positive and negative deviations from the expected return are considered in the new measure simultaneously but differently. This innovation makes it easy to reasonably describe and control the asymmetry and fat-tail characteristics of the loss distribution and to properly reflect the investor’s risk attitude. With its easy computation of the new risk measure, a realistic portfolio selection model is established by taking into account typical market frictions such as taxes, transaction costs, and value constraints. Empirical results demonstrate that our new portfolio selection model can not only suitably reflect the impact of different trading constraints, but find more robust optimal portfolios, which are better than the optimal portfolio obtained under the conditional value-at-risk measure in terms of diversification and typical performance ratios.     

Performance of impact investing: A value creation approach

The purpose of this article is to present an overview about the origins of value creation in impact investing and propose a measure of value creation. According to this point of view, impact investing, i.e. investing in enterprises with a both social and financial objective can be justified only if those enterprises can provide for a higher performance than with a simple portfolio diversification (separate investment in two types of activity). After an overview about the sources of value creation in impact investees as well as about a discussion on existing methods, we propose a method to measure multidimensional value creation.     

The dynamics of portfolio management contracts

We consider the multiperiod relationship between a client anda portfolio manager and the resulting problem of motivatinga manager of unknown ability to acquire valuable information.We explore the contractual form and the optimal retention policyof the client and find that the optimal initial set of contractsfeatures a smaller performance based fee component paid to themanager than in a first-best contract, and the contract choiceelicits only partial information about the manager. As a result,ex post performance measurement is critical to future recontracting.In general, managers are retained only if the returns on theirportfolio exceed the benchmark by an appropriate amount.     

Admissible uncertainty in the intertemporal asset pricing model

We embed the Sharpe-Lintner, two-parameter asset pricing theory in an intertemporal general equilibrium model. The investment opportunity set changes stochastically over time; in general the short-term and long-term interest rates and the distribution of the rate of return of the market portfolio are non-stationary. This non-stationarity, which is admissible in the Sharpe-Lintner model, has two implications: First, it may bias econometric methods which fail to explicitly take into account the non-stationarity. Second, the sequential application of the Sharpe-Lintner model in the discounting of stochastic cash flows becomes computationally complex and of little practical use.     

The performance of international asset allocation strategies using conditioning information

The existence of predictable components in conditional expected returns has been widely reported. We propose a test of the economic significance of this phenomenon by designing dynamic international allocation strategies based on a conditioning information set. We compare the performance of these dynamic strategies with some market portfolio benchmark and with unconditionally efficient portfolios (among the set of primitive assets). We find the performance of the dynamic strategies to be superior. The difference is not only statistically significant, it is economically large.     

Portfolio risk management in a data-rich environment

We study risk assessment using an optimal portfolio in which the weights are functions of latent factors and firm-specific characteristics (hereafter, diffusion index portfolio). The factors are used to summarize the information contained in a large set of economic data and thus reflect the state of the economy. First, we evaluate the performance of the diffusion index portfolio and compare it to both that of a portfolio in which the weights depend only on firm-specific characteristics and an equally weighted portfolio. We then use value-at-risk, expected shortfall, and downside probability to investigate whether the weights-modeling approach, which is based on factor analysis, helps reduce market risk. Our empirical results clearly indicate that using economic factors together with firm-specific characteristics helps protect investors against market?risk.     

How to quantify the influence of correlations on investment diversification

When assets are correlated, benefits of investment diversification are reduced. To measure the influence of correlations on investment performance, a new quantity—the effective portfolio size—is proposed and investigated in both artificial and real situations. We show that in most cases, the effective portfolio size is much smaller than the actual number of assets in the portfolio and that it lowers even further during financial crises.     

Are performance measures equally stable?

Managed portfolio performance evaluation is an important issue from both academics’ and investors’ points of view. One important aspect concerns the choice of the measure used to assess performance, because each index offers a different perspective about the trade-off between return level and risk exposure. A related crucial issue is the stability of measures over time and, hence, their predictive power about future results. In this work, we address the problem of evaluating of the stability of a performance measure. First, we discuss the use of alternative criteria to measure stability and propose a stability index based on changes of ranks over several periods of time. We also propose a statistical test to evaluate the homogeneity of the stability of alternative performance measures. Second, we suggest a composite performance measure, built as a linear combination of various indexes, specifically conceived to be maximally stable over time while preserving information about risk-adjusted return behavior. An application to a set of US mutual funds belonging to the Large Blend category shows how these methods work.     

A generalized coherent risk measure: The firm's perspective

This note extends the concept of a coherent risk measure to make it more consistent with a firm's capital budgeting perspective. A coherent risk measure defines the risk of a portfolio to be that amount of cash that must be added to the portfolio such that it becomes acceptable to a regulator. As such, a coherent risk measure implicitly assumes that the firm has already made its capital budgeting decision. Except for a cash infusion, the portfolio composition remains unchanged. We propose a generalized version of a coherent risk measure that also allows the portfolio composition to change as well. Once the investment decisions are fixed, our measure collapses to a coherent risk measure.     

Performance evaluation of portfolio insurance strategies using stochastic dominance criteria

This paper evaluates the performance of the stop-loss, synthetic put and constant proportion portfolio insurance techniques based on a block-bootstrap simulation. We consider not only traditional performance measures, but also some recently developed measures that capture the non-normality of the return distribution (value-at-risk, expected shortfall, and the Omega measure). We compare them to the more comprehensive stochastic dominance criteria. The impact of changing the rebalancing frequency and level of capital protection is examined. We find that, even though a buy-and-hold strategy generates higher average excess returns, it does not stochastically dominate the portfolio insurance strategies, nor vice versa. Our results indicate that a 100% floor value should be preferred to lower floor values and that daily-rebalanced synthetic put and CPPI strategies dominate their counterparts with less frequent rebalancing.     

Conditional performance measurement using portfolio weights: evidence for pension funds

This paper combines the use of portfolio holdings data and conditioning information to create a new performance measure. Our conditional weight-based measure has several advantages. Using conditioning information avoids biases in weight-based measures as discussed by Grinblatt and Titman (J. Business 60 (1993)). When conditioning information is used, returns-based measures face a bias if managers can trade between observation dates. The new measures avoid this interim trading bias. We use the new measures to provide fresh insights about performance in a sample of U.S. equity pension fund managers.     

Optimal portfolio selection and compression in an incomplete market

We investigate an optimal investment problem with a general performance criterion which, in particular, includes discontinuous functions. Prices are modelled as diffusions and the market is incomplete. We find an explicit solution for the case of limited diversification of the portfolio, i.e. for the portfolio compression problem. By this we mean that any admissible strategy may include no more than m different stocks concurrently, where m may be less than the total number n of available stocks.