From January 2019 Duke employees who are paid monthly have a changed set of mutual funds to choose from in their Duke University Faculty and Staff Retirement Plan. Which mutual funds are good choices? We compare the new lineup of funds with the Vanguard funds that have been cut from the...

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...

Andrew Lo in his book, Adaptive Markets, advocates an investment product that he names a “dynamic index.” He has facilitated the operation of a variant of this dynamic indexation, “dynamic allocation,” by founding a company, AlphaSimplex. Another dynamic investment is GMO’s Benchmark...

Do enhanced index funds beat traditional ones? The major companies that offer the new enhanced index international mutual funds are Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), RAFI, and WisdomTree. A major provider of traditional international index funds is DFA. We compare various enhanced international...

How much of a difference do smart trading strategies, stock choice, and lending securities to short sellers reduce the net expenses of Vanguard’s index ETFs below their reported expense ratios? Using Vanguard’s reported returns for their index ETFs and their benchmarks I discover the return...

Jack Bogle, Vanguard’s founder, argued that high expenses and turnover doom mutual funds to inferior returns. This is generally true. In this paper I explore whether this is also true of Vanguard’s actively managed mutual funds. Much of Vanguard’s reputation rests on its index funds....