In this study we evaluate the performance of actively managed equity mutual funds against a set of passively managed index funds. We find that the return spread between the best performing actively managed funds and a factor-mimicking portfolio of passive funds is positive and as large as 3 to 5...

The adequate evaluation of mutual fund performance and of the fund managers’ ability to add value is an issue to which it has been given special attention in the recent financial literature. One of the traditional evaluation measures most commonly used is Carhart's alpha. However, one of the...

The paper revisits the issue of robustness of fund performance by evaluating European large-cap equity funds. For this fund category traditional market risk factor adjusted performance measures are expected to be fairly robust. However, for the sample of 65 European large-cap mutual equity...

To many people, the terror of falling share prices is often significant, often more so than the pleasure of gains. Accordingly, investors often want to minimize downside volatility as a part of their portfolio planning. Investors already have several tools to measure downside volatility,...

This paper develops two measures of performance inconsistency based on information derived from funds' actual performance and their disclosed portfolio holdings. Using these measures, we show that funds with unskilled managers and poor performance are associated with greater inconsistency....

This paper is the first systematic analysis of the impact of diversification on the performance of private equity funds. A unique data set allows the exact evaluation of diversification across the dimensions financing stages, industries, and countries. Very different levels of diversification...

Performance measurement is an area of crucial interest in asset valuation and investment management. High volatility as well as time aggregation of returns, amongst other characteristics, may distort the results of conventional measures of performance. In this work, we study the performance of...

The tournament hypothesis of Brown et al. (1996) posits that managers of poorly performing funds actively increase portfolio risk in the second half of the year. At the same time, it is a well-established stylized fact that stock returns and the subsequent return standard deviation are...

We investigate the performance of the German equity mutual fund industry over 20 years (monthly data 1990-2009) using the false discovery rate (FDR) to examine both model selection and performance measurement. When using the Fama-French three factor (3F) model (with no market timing) we find at...

This paper studies hedge fund performance and confirms reports of an aggregate decline over the past decade. We test whether a comprehensive set of prediction models can select subsets of individual funds that buck the trend and subsequently outperform. Seven of the predictors reliably pick...