Target-Date Funds (TDFs) facilitate retirement planning by varying asset allocation over time with the goal of reducing portfolio risk. We explore potential agency problems in TDFs by examining their return performance and flow-performance relation. We find that TDFs under-perform balanced funds...

Since Markowitz (1958) and Sharpe (1966), the increasing number of criteria and performance indicators made mutual funds analysis more complex and sometimes risky. In this study we propose to identify the most relevant indicators to classify mutual funds based on their statistical properties....

Recent literature indicates that a liquidity investment style – the process of investing in relatively less liquid stocks within the liquid universe of publicly traded stocks – has led to excess returns relative to size and value. While previously documented at the security level, we examine...

Target-Date Funds (TDFs) facilitate retirement planning by varying asset allocation over time with the goal of reducing portfolio risk. We explore potential agency problems in TDFs by examining their return performance and flow-performance relation. We find that TDFs under-perform balanced funds...

This paper combines the use of portfolio holdings data and Principal Component Analysis to create synthetic fund indexes. Synthetic funds are funds portfolios which aim to duplicate a fund market in order to represent alternative benchmarks to compare the performance of investment funds. Our...

Passive investing, particularly in emerging markets, has become an increasingly popular means of quick, “diversified” exposure to a particular segment of the markets. Defensive investors, as Benjamin Graham noted, would be best served owning a diversified list of leading companies. Yet it's...

There is growing consensus that Target Date Funds (TDFs) represent a "better" solution for retirement investing than traditional strategic portfolios like a 60/40 equities/bonds. While much marketing material hints at the fact that TDFs may provide a "safer" or "less risky" solution for...

Value investors generally characterize themselves as the grown ups in the investment world, unswayed by perceptions or momentum, and driven by fundamentals. While this may be true, at least in the abstract, there are at least three distinct strands of value investing. The first, passive value...

This paper studies the role of investors' optimism about future economic growth in their investment decisions. Based on simple intuition, we argue that investors base their future investment decisions not only on asset-specific information, but also on their expectations about future economic...

I estimate a mean-variance efficient (MVE) portfolio assuming that the MVE frontier is spanned by optimal portfolios that fund managers offer to heterogeneous investors. Consistent with predictions of mutual fund separation, the estimated MVE portfolio can price the cross section of portfolios...