Investment funds provide a low cost method of sharing in the rewards from capitalism. Recently “alternative investments” such as hedge funds have grown rapidly and the trading strategies open to hedge funds are now becoming available to mutual funds and even to ordinary retail investors. In...

We use a multiple hypothesis testing framework to estimate the false discovery rate (FDR) amongst UK equity mutual funds. For all funds, we find a relatively high FDR for the best funds of 67% (at a 10% significance level), which indicates that only around 2% of all funds truly outperform their...

We apply a recent nonparametric methodology to test the market timing skills of UK equity mutual funds. The methodology has a number of advantages over the widely used regression based tests of Treynor-Mazuy (1966) and Henriksson-Merton (1981). We find a relatively small number of funds (around...

We evaluate the academic research on mutual fund performance in the US and UK concentrating particularly on the literature published over the last 20 years where innovation and data advances have been most marked. The evidence suggests that ex-post, there are around 2-5% of top performing UK and...

Using a comprehensive data set on (surviving and non-surviving) UK mutual funds (April 1975 - December 2002), we use a bootstrap methodology to distinguish between 'skill' and 'luck' for individual funds. This methodology allows for non-normality in the idiosyncratic risks of the funds - a major...

We re-examine US mutual fund performance persistence. We investigate persistence (i) using both “academic” factor models and “practitioner” index models, (ii) using decile-size recursive portfolios and also portfolios formed from smaller numbers of funds, (iii) using nonparametric...

We re-examine performance persistence amongst UK mutual funds. Specifically, we investigate performance persistence among small portfolios of past high-performing funds. In contrast to the more common analysis of decile portfolios of funds, we focus on persistence in the more extreme positive...