We investigate the portfolio performance of retail investors who combine stocks and passive exchange traded funds (P-ETFs) by relying on both proprietary trading records and survey data. We use propensity score matching to control for all the key investor characteristics and better identify the...

This paper empirically examines the relationship between different classes of mutual funds, measures of investors’ expectations and business cycle movements in the BRICS markets over the 1996Q1-2017Q3 period. Applying the Panel Vector Autoregressive (PVAR) model in a Generalized Method of...

We study whether mutual fund managers gain an edge through thematic investment strategies—investing in stocks that may benefit from a particular theme. We use textual analysis of 10-K filings to identify stocks exposed to different semantic themes and measure a mutual fund’s thematic...

We examine two forward-looking mutual fund ratings: the analyst rating produced by human analysts and the quantitative rating generated by a machine learning technique. The analyst rating identifies outperforming funds, while the quantitative rating fails to do so—this difference is mostly due...