Rational investors should account for risk factor exposure when allocating capital to mutual funds. Two recent influential studies use mutual fund flows to test whether investors distinguish between performance driven by managers' skill and systematic risk factors. Both studies found that...

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...

This chapter evaluates the returns of the domestic equity funds of three major American companies: Vanguard, Fidelity, and Dimensional Fund Advisors relative to benchmarks using the Fama-French factors from January 2001 through December 2018. We also present Sharpe's (1992) style analysis...

The active share of mutual funds drops significantly when investor sentiment is high, indicating that fund managers reduce their active stock selection and stay closer to their benchmarks during such periods. Our evidence is consistent with fund managers being sentiment-prone—challenging the...

An idealized model of the investment process redefines the respective roles of security analysts and portfolio managers, quantifies such concepts as activity and aggressiveness, and explains how the individual analyst's efforts at forecasting returns translate into improved portfolio performance

The main purpose of the paper is empirically evaluating selectivity skills and market timing ability of Polish fund managers during the period from January 2009 to November 2014. After the global financial crisis of 2008, in this period of quantitative easing (QE), thanks to an increase in the...

This paper contrasts the return of Vanguard and Fidelity active stock mutual funds with the style-mimicking portfolio of Vanguard’s index funds. Vanguard’s equally-weighted portfolio of domestic active funds out-returns the portfolio of Vanguard index funds with the same style, as does...

Closet indexing is the practice of staying close to the benchmark index while still claiming to be an active mutual fund manager and charging active-management fees. Recent work shows that active mutual fund managers are more likely to closet index during down markets. Around the time of the...

In this study we re-visit the performance of 887 active UK equity mutual funds using a new approach proposed by Angelidis, Giamouridis and Tessaromatis (2013). The authors argue that mutual funds stock selection is driven by the benchmark index, so if the benchmark generates alpha, there will be...

This paper studies the relation between fund performance and fund attributes in the Swedish market. Performance is measured as the alpha in a linear regression of fund returns on several benchmark assets, allowing for time-varying betas. The estimated performance is then used in a...