You Learn When It Hurts: Evidence in the Mutual Fund Industry

This paper aims to contribute to the lack of research on the learning process of mutual fund markets. The empirical design is focused on the ability of the Spanish equity mutual fund industry to learn from its important errors. The choice of this industry is justified by both its relevance in the European mutual fund markets and some specific characteristics, such as the concentration and the banking control of the industry, which may affect the learning process. Our main objectives are to identify important trading errors in mutual fund management by applying three independent filters based on the relative importance of each decision, and then testing the evolution of these errors both at the industry level and at the fund family level. We apply the dynamic model of generalized method of moments (GMM), and we find an overall significant decrease in the percentage of important trading errors over time, thereby providing evidence of the global learning process of the industry. In addition, we find that a large number of fund families drive this evidence. Finally, we obtain that the family size and its dependence on financial groups do not seem to play significant roles in explaining the learning process. Therefore, we conclude that fund managers have incentives to learn from their important trading errors, in order to avoid them in future decisions, due to their serious negative consequences on fund performance, regardless of the characteristics of the families to which they belong.

Mutual fund manager turnover: an empirical investigation of performance

PurposeWhen a fund manager leaves, the investment strategy of the fund changes or remains the same. The departing fund manager's resignation is either forced or voluntary. The study investigates the relationship between the portfolio manager's transition and the fund's investment strategy and how the change affects the mutual fund returns in the subsequent period.Design/methodology/approachThe authors examine 148 fund manager changes in India between April 2005–March 2018 using three performance measures: abnormal return (fund return minus benchmark return), Jensen's alpha and Carhart four-factor alpha. The analysis includes an event study methodology, followed by a two-step Fama–MacBeth regression approach.FindingsContrary to the previous studies conducted in the developed markets, the authors find that fund performance improves irrespective of whether the fund manager change is forced or voluntary. The outperformance after the fund manager's exit is significant for funds belonging to the larger fund families.Originality/valueIn the context of investment management, the authors provide a conceptual framework to understand the effect of fund manager exit on mutual fund performance. The authors substantiate their arguments with empirical evidence. To the best of the authors' understanding, this is the first research to examine the effect of changing mutual fund managers in an emerging market setting.

Do Fund Size, Style and Rating Explain Performance?

The purpose of this quantitative investigation was to examine whether performance (1-Year, 3-Year, and 5-Year annual returns) differences exist among fund categories by size and style (large-cap growth, large-cap blend, mid-cap growth, and small-cap growth) and fund ratings (5-Star and 4-Star) controlling covariate variables (standard deviation, turnover rate, and top-10 holding) of the United States equity MFs. Morningstar Inc. provided an insightful measure of fund performance annual returns and fund efficacy ratings. The study utilized the Analysis of Covariance and Multivariate Analysis of Covariance methods. The investigation revealed that the large-cap growth fund category produced superior annual returns than other fund families. The five-star-rated funds performed better than the four-star-rated funds. Turnover and top-10 percentage asset holdings had a statistically significant effect on fund annual performance. Investors and asset managers should consider the fund style, size, fund ratings for making short-term, medium, and long-term financial investment decisions. Keywords: mutual fund, fund style, fund size, fund ratings, market return

A Continuous-Time Version of a Delegated Asset Management Problem

This paper develops a continuous-time model to study the widely used investment mandates in the institutional asset management industry. In this paper, just like He and Xiong (2013), we suppose that the asset management industry has a two-layered incentive structure, and fund families charging investors fixed management fees while compensating individual fund managers based on fund performance. Different from He and Xiong (2013), we suppose that the fund family aims to select an optimal incentive strategy to maximize its terminal benefits, while the fund manager needs to select the optimal effort level and the optimal investment portfolio to maximize his terminal net discounted compensation in a continuous-time model. By using dynamic programming principle and stochastic differential game theory, the optimal strategies and value functions of both sides are derived. At last, numerical studies are provided to illustrate the effects of all the parameters on the optimal strategies. The result reveals that the optimal incentive mechanism will redistribute both the benefit of the fund families and the cost of the fund managers’ effort.

Institutional Debtholder Governance

Using data on the universe of U.S. based mutual funds, we find that two out of five fund families hold corporate bonds of firms in which they also own an equity stake. We show that the greater the fraction of debt a fund family holds in a given firm, the greater its propensity to vote in line with the interests of firm debtholders at shareholder meetings, even when against Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) recommendation. Voting has direct policy consequences as firms that receive more votes in favor of creditors make corporate decisions more in line with the interests of debtholders.

ISLAMIC VS CONVENTIONAL FUNDS WITHIN THE FAMILY: SELECTIVITY SKILLS AND MARKET TIMING ABILITY

ABSTRACT The aim of the study is to compare the performance of Islamic mutual fund (IMF) and conventional mutual fund (CMF) within the same family, in addition, to examine the performance of fund family in Malaysia for the period from 2007 to 2018. The study used eight measures of performance, raw returns, excess returns, Sharpe ratio, Treynor ratio, Jensen alpha, Carhart four-factor model as selectivity models, In addition to Treynor & Mazuy (TM) and Hendrickson & Merton (HM) as market timing models. The study contributes by investigating and compares the performance at the family level. The results reported that IMFs exhibited some fund selection ability over CMFs. However, both types of funds displayed poor market timing ability. At a fund family level, the results show the fund families exhibited good fund selections skills, at the same time, fund family still exhibited poor market timing ability. The novel result of this study that the difference in performance between Islamic and conventional funds shrank compared to the results of previous studies. Due to the common advantages offered by the families for both types of funds. The findings are important to investors because the results provide new evidence about the fund families' performance. Most investors follow the top-down approach, where mutual fund investors initially choose fund families before deciding which funds to hold. In addition, the results are important for managers to decide which types of funds that they may issue in their own families, so that they can perform well in the future.

INVESTMENT OBJECTIVES AND FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SPANISH MUTUAL FUNDS

This paper analyses which variables influence the disappearance of mutual funds in the Spanish market and whether these variables vary depending on the investment objectives. The following variables are tested: age, size, investment flows, return, volatility, Sharpe ratio, Morningstar rating, and fund family. The Kaplan-Meier estimator and an extension of the Cox model, the Andersen-Gill model are used and the results indicate that the impact of some variables on survival capacity is different depending on the fund’s investment objectives. The originality of this article is twofold. The analysis of disappearance takes the investment objectives of the mutual funds into account and a new variable, the Morningstar rating, is introduced. Moreover, no previous study examines survival capacity in the Spanish market according to different investment objectives. In Spain, mutual funds are highly concentrated because most of them are in the hands of a small number of banks who also control the country’s largest fund families. This characteristic not only makes the Spanish market an interesting one for analysis, but it also means that the results of this paper are significant for mutual fund investors.