Selection ability and market timing skills of mutual fund and unit trust managers in a developing economy: evidence from Ghana

Abstract

PurposeThe study assess the selection ability and market timing skills of mutual fund and unit trust managers in Ghana.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses an improved survivorship bias-free dataset of yearly after-fee returns of all mutual funds and unit trusts operating in Ghana from January 2011 to December 2019, cumulating in nine years of quantitative fund data. The authors assess Mutual funds and Unit trusts that ever existed, “alive” or “dead,” over the sample period in the study. The authors construct factor loadings to enable the application of multifactor models in the analysis. The authors apply the unconditional versions of the Jensen alpha, Fama-French three-factor, and Carhart four-factor models to determine the selection ability and market timing skills of 32 mutual funds and 17 unit trusts. The authors deploy HAC-consistent robust standard errors to the OLS estimations to subdue the effect of heterogeneity and autocorrelation.FindingsThe results indicate that, on average, mutual funds and unit trust managers possess market timing skills but no selection ability. When the results are decomposed into fund types, fixed-income and balanced mutual fund managers possess selection ability and market timing skills.Originality/valueTo the authors' best knowledge, this study is the earliest to examine the selection ability and market timing skills of both mutual fund and unit trust managers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It is also the earliest to construct factor loadings for the Ghana stock market.