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

Purpose Stirred by scant regard for market phases in portfolio performance assessments, the current paper investigates the active versus passive investment strategies under the bull and bear market conditions in emerging markets focusing on South Africa as a case study....

The proposition that a prudent investor should be diversified is widely accepted if not incontrovertible for ordinary investors – investors who have no reasonable expectation of influencing company management or business policy. Indeed, fiduciary duty requires that trustees and other...

There is mounting evidence that retail investors make predictable, costly investment mistakes, including underinvestment, naïve diversification, and payment of excessive fund fees. Over the past thirty-five years, however, participant-directed 401(k) plans have largely replaced professionally...

Is the asset management sector a source of financial instability? This paper contributes to the debate by performing a macroprudential stress test in order to quantify systemic risks in the mutual fund sector. For this purpose we include the welldocumented flow-performance relationship as an...

Passive investing, particularly in emerging markets, has become an increasingly popular means of quick, “diversified” exposure to a particular segment of the markets. Flows into passive emerging market products have been so strong that assets in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) designed to...

Using security-by-security data on investor holdings in the euro area, we study run dynamics across different fund-shares of the same fund during the unprecedented liquidity crisis in March 2020. For an average bond or equity mutual fund-share, households, other euro area funds, and the foreign...

Mutual fund portfolio turnover ratios (PTR) are at the center of the short-termism debate, which criticizes corporate maneuvers taken to prop up near-term earnings at the expense of long-term, value focused investments and policies. Scholars and policymakers often rely on portfolio turnover...

This study shows that exchange-traded fund (ETF) misvaluation — based on return differentials between ETFs and their net asset values (NAV) — comove excessively across ETFs. Excess comovements are positive (negative) and significant across ETFs in similar (distant) investment styles. Further...

I show that the shape of flow–performance relationship among open-end funds varies with investor sentiment. This link is stronger when the market tone is optimistic. Cross-sectional comparison reveals that the convexity of the relationship is more pronounced among funds of the type that...