Essays On Mutual Fund Activeness And Sustainability As A Flow Determinant
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| Author | : Sebastian Fischer |
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| Release | : 2019 |
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This dissertation contributes to two recent debates in the mutual fund literature: The impact of sustainability on mutual fund flows and the connection between fund activeness and mutual fund performance. In March 2016, Morningstar, one of the leading information providers in the mutual fund industry, introduced its mutual fund Sustainability Rating. The Rating provides investors with an easy-to-understand measure to identify funds that invest in accordance with high environmental, social, and governance standards. Chapter 1 investigates the effect of this Rating on mutual fund flows. An average high-rated retail fund receives up to USD 10.1 million higher net flows and an average low-rated retail fund suffers from up to USD 3.5 million lower net flows than an average-rated fund during the first year after the publication of the Rating. This result stresses the importance of sustainability as an investment criterion and the impact of the Sustainability Rating as a source of information to private investors. Chapters 2 through 4 examine whether the trading activity of a fund manager or fund activeness, that is the deviation of a fund portfolio from its benchmark, is linked to future performance. The fund literature has identified various activity measures that can predict fund returns. Chapter 2 shows that two of the most important measures, Active Share and the R2 selectivity measure, have not been good predictors after 2003 when controlling for different benchmark indices and alternative risk factors. Chapter 3 examines the investment performance of funds whose exposures to the risk factors of the Carhart model vary significantly over time. The analysis shows that funds with volatile factor weights achieve on average lower returns than funds with stable factor exposures. After testing for alternative explanations, this result provides evidence that fund managers fail to time risk factors. This finding also contributes to the current debate on whether risk factors can be timed. Chapter 4 addresses the question whether fund managers trade more in times of large market mispricing and, therefore, whether fund turnover is positively correlated to the subsequent fund performance. The results confirm respective findings from earlier research for an international mutual fund sample. They additionally show that this turnover-performance relationship is particularly strong in countries with highly skilled fund managers, who trade more in times of high market opportunities. Furthermore, the effect is stronger in markets with a low performance persistence.
| Author | : Xuemei Guo |
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| Total Pages | : 312 |
| Release | : 2017 |
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This dissertation investigates the determinants of mutual fund flows and mutual fund performance. The first chapter examines the response of fund investors to style volatility and the impact of style volatility on the flow-performance relationship. Three main empirical findings are obtained using both a portfolio approach and a multivariate regression approach. First, I find that there is a significant positive relationship between the style volatility and the subsequent fund flows to mutual funds. This finding can be interpreted as either fund managers having style timing ability or fund managers catering to investors preferences or tastes. Second, the positive relationship between past style volatility and fund flows is less pronounced for funds with superior past performance. Lastly, fund style volatility has a dampening effect on the flow-performance relationship: the flow-performance sensitivity weakens by 12% when the past style volatility increases by one standard deviation. It is likely that performance is perceived as a less informative signal of investment ability for fund managers who follow inconsistent styles over time. The second chapter studies how the response of fund investors to past risk varies over business cycles. I employ the NBER boom indicator, the Consumer Sentiment Index, and the National Activity Index to proxy for economic conditions. I find that mutual fund investors react differently to risk across economic environments. Funds with more volatile past returns discourage fund investors. The investors’ demand for actively managed funds is higher under good market conditions. Fund flows are less responsive to risk during expansionary economic periods. This finding may indicate that fund investors are risk averse and become less risk averse in good market states. The third chapter empirically examines whether mutual fund performance is affected by prior family performance. I propose two testable hypotheses: the information and resource sharing hypothesis and the cross-fund subsidization hypothesis. The empirical findings suggest that there is a significant positive relationship between prior family performance and subsequent fund performance. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that mutual funds in the same family share informational resources. This positive relation also justifies the finding in the mutual fund flow literature that fund flows are higher for funds with higher past family performance. Furthermore, I find that the predictive power of the prior family performance is stronger in larger fund families.
| Author | : Lennart Berger |
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| Total Pages | : 48 |
| Release | : 2018-11-13 |
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| ISBN | : 9783668833265 |
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1.3, University of Frankfurt (Main), language: English, abstract: This bachelor thesis investigates different determinants for absolute and relative fund flows in socially responsible investment (SRI) funds and conventional funds on the German Market. My multivariate analyses study the flow performance relationship, but also incorporate persistence in flows, expenses and typical fund characteristics such as age, total net assets and number of share classes. I find a high dependency of flows on prior returns from funds known as a return chasing behaviour. My model shows different flow-performance relations depending on the kind of sustainability fund and how the perception of investors changed over time towards being more sensitive regarding SRI criteria. Most importantly there exists a strong momentum effect for funds shown with persistent flows in Germany over different periods of time.
| Author | : Gulnara R. Zaynutdinova |
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| Release | : 2015 |
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Chapter two investigates timing abilities of alpha-opportunities by mutual fund managers. Active portfolio management is costly and may not deliver higher net returns to investors in the absence of sufficient alpha-opportunities when, e.g., stock returns are predominantly driven by systematic factors and highly correlated. Thus, mutual funds should engage in less active trading when stock valuation is expected to be less divergent. Our results show that mutual funds on average have the ability timing alpha-opportunities, with large-value and large-growth funds exhibiting the strongest timing skill. The results are robust when we control for past fund flows and returns, macroeconomic variables, and other potential timing skills. More importantly, funds with significantly positive timing skill earn 0.05% higher monthly returns, as measured by four-factor alpha, in subsequent month than those with negative timing skill. Our study contributes to the existing literature by proposing a novel measure to assess an important attribute of mutual fund active management ability.
| Author | : Zhi Wang |
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| Total Pages | : 336 |
| Release | : 2004 |
| Genre | : Investments |
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| Author | : Svetoslav Covachev |
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| Total Pages | : 0 |
| Release | : 2019 |
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In light of this, Essays 1 and 3, co-authored with Vijay Yadav, study the sensitivity of investment flows to past performance, also known as flow-performance sensitivity (FPS). The main aim of Essay 1 is to contribute towards the ongoing debate regarding the shape of the flow-performance relationship in the equity mutual fund industry. Essentially, the question is whether the relationship is linear or non-linear. Whereas Essay 1 addresses the shape of the flow-performance relationship, Essay 3 studies the determinants of its strength. Past performance is a signal that is used by investors when making investment allocation decisions. The main finding of Essay 3 is that the composition of the fund portfolio has an impact on the FPS of the fund. More specifically, a mutual fund manager can decrease flow-performance sensitivity by increasing the total equity portfolio weights of defensive stocks and sensitive stocks, where the former is more effective. In Essay 2, I examine active equity mutual funds that close to new investors.
| Author | : Leng Ling |
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| Release | : 2008 |
| Genre | : Mutual funds |
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Essay 1. Does mutual fund window-dressing promote fund flows?--I investigate the effectiveness of window-dressing as a potential strategy to be used by mutual fund managers to promote fund flows. Using a rank gap measure as a proxy for the likelihood that window-dressing has occurred, I find that fund investors as whole punish those managers who are suspected to have engaged in window-dressing. That is, I find a negative relation between the window-dressing measure and net fund flows in subsequent quarters after controlling for fund performance, size, expense ratio, and other pertinent characteristics. I also find that window-dressing leads to higher trading activities and lower fund performance. Essay 2. A life cycle analysis of performance and growth in U.S. mutual funds--I propose a five-stage growth model to describe the life cycle evolution of mutual funds and show that mutual funds exhibit distinctive performance, size, expense ratios, asset turnover, and other pertinent characteristics through stages of incubation, high-growth, low-growth, maturity, and decline. I also investigate the viability of managerial strategies to affect a fund's life cycle evolution and find that changing a declining fund's investment objective is effective in rejuvenating asset growth and thus repositioning the fund to younger life cycle stages. However, the strategy of adding portfolio managers appears to have no such rejuvenation effect.
| Author | : Yu Xia |
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| Total Pages | : 0 |
| Release | : 2022 |
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"This thesis consists of two essays on evaluating mutual fund performance and its predictability. In the first essay, I study the ex ante predictability of 12 well-known predictors for fund performance from investors' perspective. The 12 predictors cover three major categories: fund characteristics, fund performance, and holding-based activeness measures, which are constructed using real-time information. For performance evaluation, I exploit two types of fund picking strategies with either rule-based approach or machine learning methods and find that utilizing machine learning can deliver superior real-time economic gains for investors with fund short-term performance being the primary driver underlying predictability. Specifically, using variable selection methods such as LASSO and elastic net at individual predictor level can generate annual 1.3%-1.7% real-time alphas after adjusting for standard risk factors. The essay further examines whether real-world investors react to those well-known predictors when evaluating mutual fund performance. Using a novel approach to decomposing fund returns, I find that conditional on investors' usage of CAPM, investors react to the components of CAPM alpha implied by predictors in different ways, and investor reaction to predictive information embedded in predictors is stronger within aggressive growth funds. These results provide empirical support for Gârleanu and Pedersen (2018) and suggest ex ante predictability exists not due to lack of investor reaction but as the compensation for employing costly algorithms to identify skilled managers.The second essay examines how decision-making hierarchy in team-managed U.S. equity mutual funds affects their performance and risk-taking behavior. Employing a unique hand-collected dataset, we find that vertically-managed funds with lead managers earn 75 bps per year lower Fama-French five-factor alpha than their horizontally-managed counterparts. Moreover, vertically-managed funds hold less concentrated portfolios and are exposed to lower residual risk, thus showing signs of inferior security selection ability. Using mutual fund industry as a laboratory, the second essay provides evidence supporting a horizontal decision-making structure in organizations functioning in an uncertain expectation environment. These results echo similar mechanisms as in recent cross-country studies on the benefits of democratic form of government for country's economic growth"--
| Author | : Kai Aschick |
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| Release | : 2017 |
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This thesis contributes to existing literature by analysing the role of performance streaks in the US mutual fund industry. Existing research suggests that performance streaks, i.e. multiple consecutive months of positive or negative performance, are an important determinant of mutual fund flows. My dataset comprises monthly returns and net-flows from US equity mutual funds from 1996 through 2015. My first analysis shows that streaks are not an indication of performance persistence and should not be used in investment decisions. Next, I develop two forecasting models using streaks based on several different performance metrics, such as excess returns and CAPM-alphas. The first one is a probit model that forecasts future investor sentiment, measured by the sign of future net-flows. This model is very robust to different time period specifications. The second one is a multiple linear regression model that forecasts actual future net- flows. The performance of this model strongly depends on the time period specified, as it performs poorly following the financial crisis. In both models the best-performing specification uses streaks based on CAPM-alphas. However, a Shapley decomposition reveals that streaks are, despite being statistically significant, the least-important predictors of future net-flows. Instead, lagged net-flows are the most-important determinants of future net-flows. The results of this thesis suggest that active streaks tip the scales when investors decide between two or more funds with a comparable track record. Hence, the results presented are ambiguous regarding investor rationality.
| Author | : Scott Stewart |
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| Total Pages | : 148 |
| Release | : 2015 |
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Manager selection is a critical step in implementing any investment program. Investors hire portfolio managers to act as their agents, and portfolio managers are then expected to perform to the best of their abilities and in the investors' best interests. Investors must practice due diligence when selecting portfolio managers. They need to not only identify skillful managers, but also determine the appropriate weights to assign to those managers. This book is designed to help investors improve their ability to select managers. Achieving this goal includes reviewing techniques for hiring active, indexed, and alternative managers; highlighting strategies for setting portfolio manager weights and monitoring current managers; and considering the value of quantitative and qualitative methods for successful manager selection.
