T he number of mutual funds has grown dramatically in recent years. The Financial Research Corporation data base, the source of data for this article, lists 7,734 distinct mutual fund portfolios. Mutual funds are now the preferred way for individual investors and many institutions to participate in the capital markets, and their popularity has increased demand for evaluations of fund performanc...

The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we show that mutual fund theorems hold when minimizing the probability of lifetime ruin (that is, wealth reaching zero before death), as Merton (1971) does when maximizing the utility of consumption. Bayraktar and Young (2007a) determine when the investment strategies are identical under the two problems of maximizing utility of consumption or ...

This paper examines the relationship between seasonality, idiosyncratic risk and mutual fund returns using multifactor models. We use a large sample containing the return histories of 728 UK mutual funds over a 23-year period to measure fund performance. We present evidence that idiosyncratic risk cannot be eliminated, we also find evidence of seasonality in all fund categories. Specifically, w...

The mutual fund industry would like us to believe that fund expenses are justifiable by their extensive management expertise, security analysis and the consequent delivery of returns that exceed the market performance. Management know-how is costly and thus it drives up the expenditure of actively managed mutual funds and potentially lowers their net returns. Nevertheless the fund managers argu...

Introduction This paper primarily examines the advantages of bond mutual funds over portfolios of directly held bonds for both institutional and individual investors. First, we review the structural advantages of bond mutual funds, which, compared with separately managed and laddered portfolios of individual bonds, generally provide greater diversification; more regular cash flows that promote ...

This paper compares the two bootstrap methods of Kosowski et al. (2006) and Fama and French (2010) using a new dataset on equity mutual funds in the UK. We find that: the average equity mutual fund manager is unable to deliver outperformance from stock selection or market timing, once allowance is made for fund manager fees and for a set of common risk factors that are known to influence return...

Recent studies have documented a positive relation between active management and mutual fund performance. We show that this relation holds only for fund managers who trade in an optimal way. The optimality measure that we develop, “investment alpha”, captures whether a mutual fund is trading towards mean-variance optimality, which, we argue, is the first best choice for mutual fund managers. Th...

We investigate the process of mutual fund growth both empirically and theoretically. Empirically the mutual fund size distribution is better described by a lognormal than by a power law. We explain this with a stochastic growth model based on multiplicative growth, creation and annihilation. The model is in good agreement with the data, and predicts the distribution evolves from a log normal in...