Analysis of factors affecting the excess profitability of mutual funds in Russia for 2015-2022

Abstract

The relevance of the study of financial market instruments is undeniable and well aligned with the achievement of Russia's national development goals until 2030. The subject of this article is the excess return of Russian mutual funds (MF) in the period from 2015 to 2022. The authors analyzed in detail the scientific literature and took as a basis the conclusions and results obtained in previous studies on similar topics. The aim of the study was to find the factors determining the excess return of mutual funds, which is the difference between the return of the funds and the return of the selected benchmark. The study was based on data from Investfunds Internet portal, which provides information on investment assets for a wide range of people. Econometric analysis was conducted based on an unbalanced panel consisting of an average of 185 funds per year. To achieve the objective, we studied already existing econometric models for analyzing excess fund returns and used them to construct a pass-through regression model and a fixed-effects model. Analyzing the performance of mutual funds depending on their parameters will allow investors to get relevant recommendations about which fund should be preferred to buy a share in its portfolio, which corresponds to the scientific novelty of the study. The main conclusion of the study is that using econometric criteria, the fixed-effects model was selected as the best of the constructed models. A notable contribution of the authors to the study of the topic is the identification of the main aspects that investors should pay attention to when choosing a mutual fund, namely funds with a high net asset value, the object of investment of which are stocks and money, and the direction of investment - precious metals.