Australian retail fund performance persistence

The present study extends the Australian fund performance persistence literature through the use of five performance metrics: raw returns, the Sharpe ratio, the single‐factor model and two multifactor models, the Carhart (1997) model and the Gruber (1996) model, in analysis of Australian retail fund performance over the period 1991–2000. Analysis suggests that performance persistence is sensitive to fund objective and appears to be driven by inadequate adjustment for risk.     

Discrete Spacings

Consider a string of n positions, i.e. a discrete string of length n . Units of length k are placed at random on this string in such a way that they do not overlap, and as often as possible, i.e. until all spacings between neighboring units have length less than k . When centered and scaled by n ^−1/2 the resulting numbers of spacings of length 1, 2,…,  k −1 have simultaneously a limiting normal distribution as n →∞. This is proved by the classical method of moments.