Performance of Equity Fund Investment Strategies in Poland

Abstract

The modern development of the investment funds industry is underpinned by the understanding of the efficiency and quality of asset management regarding the use of various investment strategies. The purpose of the article is to examine investment strategy performance in equity funds domiciled in Poland using standard relative and absolute measures. The proposed method uses the Sharpe ratios, the Treynor ratio and the Jensen ratios. The research covers investment funds, spanning the period 2017–2021. The study (using the Sharpe and Traynor ratios) finds that the financial instruments for investment funds domiciled in Poland may be attractive to conservative investors, as they provide excessive returns compared to the returns of risk-free assets and inflation, but for riskier investors, most of the investment funds analyzed were unattractive (negative value of the returns of funds compared to stock indices). Absolute measures of fund performance, using the Jensen ratio, are limited for comparing all groups of investment strategies. A specific negative feature in the study of investment strategies based on the Jensen ratio is their inefficiency, that is, all statistically significant values of this ratio are negative. The management of ESG-funds with investments in the European financial market was more efficient than most conventional investment funds.