The importance of asset allocation decisions in wealth management is well established. However, given its importance it is perhaps surprising that so little attention has been paid to the question of whether professional fund managers are skillful at timing market movement across asset classes...

We evaluate the performance of the US bond mutual fund industry using a comprehensive sample of bond funds over a long time period from January 1998 to February 2017. In this one study, we examine bond fund selectivity, market timing and performance persistence. We evaluate bond funds relative...

We formally test the age-old question of whether professionally managed equity funds outperform portfolios of stocks selected at random, also known as ‘dartboard' or ‘monkey' portfolios. We examine the case of UK equity mutual funds between 1980 and 2011. We employ alpha and the t-statistic...

Using a large and long sample of US and European mutual funds we examine the impact that the membership of a fund family has on performance. We test for strategic and competitive behaviour among family funds and whether this affects performance persistence and risk taking behaviour. We find no...

A great deal of research effort has sought to understand whether fund managers have skill. However, most of this research draws inferences from fund returns attributable to funds that may have been managed by many different managers over the years. In this paper we focus on the fund manager. We...