Influence of Investors' Monitoring on Equity Mutual Funds' Performance

This paper analyzes the effect of investor monitoring on the performance of equity investment funds. For that purpose, we analyze the relationship between fund performance, measured using four-factor Alpha, and a set of control variables and monitoring proxy variables. We used monthly data for 1.317 funds, from January 2005 to April 2015. We organized the sample data into two subsamples, retail and institutional funds, to compare the performance of those funds whose clienteles presents, in principle, different monitoring capacities. Institutional funds presented superior performance compared to retail funds measured by net annual return as well as by four-factor Alpha. The variables investment, measured as the minimum initial investment requirement, and type of manager were statistically significant in the retail funds sample. The results show that greater capacity to monitor fund manager behavior could diminish the occurrence of activities against investor's interests, which is one of the main contributions of this research