Foreign investment management firms have recently started to play a major role in the investment trust business in Japan. In terms of assets under management, their size and market share have almost doubled in the past several years. In part, the relative success of foreign managed firms in...

The popular perception is that hedge funds follow a reasonably well defined market-neutral investment style. While this long- short investment strategy may have characterized the first hedge funds, today hedge funds are a reasonably heterogeneous group. They are better defined in terms of their...

Recent empirical evidence has suggested that the Japanese mutual fund industry has underperformed dramatically in the past two decades. Conjectured reasons for under performance range from tax-dilution effect to high fees, high turnover and poor asset management. In this paper, we show that this...

We use an iterative relocation algorithm to identify factors in common stock returns. The benefit of the approach is that factors are portfolios of assets with non-negative weights. As a result, they are readily interpretable in terms of the characteristics of the underlying securities. The...

Alfred Cowles' (1934) test of the Dow Theory apparently provided strong evidence against the ability of Wall Street's most famous chartist to forecast the stock market. In this paper, we review Cowles' evidence and find that it supports the contrary conclusion -- that the Dow Theory, as applied...

We test the hypothesis that hedge funds were responsible for the crash in the Asian currencies in late 1997. To do so, we develop estimates of the changing positions of the largest ten currency funds in one currency, the Malaysian ringgit and to a basket of Asian currencies. Our methodology is...