Mutual Fund Performance and Stock Market Anomalies

Mutual fund competition and stock market liquidity

We study how competition in the mutual fund industry affects the stock market and its liquidity. We argue that mutual fund families operate as multi-product firms, jointly choosing fees, performance and number of funds. We show that competition between fund families distorts the incentives to collect information and induces the families to trade off performance and number of funds. An increase ...

Tests of Market Timing and Mutual Fund Performance

Evaluating Mutual Fund Performance

We study standard mutual fund performance measures, using simulated funds whose characteristics mimic actual funds. We find that performance measures used in previous mutual fund research have little ability to detect economically large magnitudes ~e.g., three percent per year! of abnormal fund performance, particularly if a fund’s style characteristics differ from those of the value-weighted m...

Distribution of Individual Stock Performances in a Mutual Fund and the Fund Manager’s Stock Picking Ability

We find that the performance distribution of the individual stocks inside a mutual fund can toss out additional information about the fund manager’s stock picking ability. When a mutual fund contains mostly mediocre-performing stocks but one super-performer, it is likely that the overall fund performance, albeit good, would be due to luck. On the other hand, a fund that has a larger number of a...

Stock Market Anomalies and Baseball Cards *

Baseball cards exhibit anomalies that are analogous to those that have been documented in financial markets, namely, momentum, price drift in the direction of past fundamental performance, and IPO underperformance. Momentum profits are higher among active players than retired players, and among newer sets than older sets. Regarding IPO underperformance, we find newly issued rookie cards underpe...