Mutual Fund Portfolios Research Articles

Beyond REITs, Investing in Real Estate Funds

This study examines the performance of U.S. real estate funds of both exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds, including passive ETFs, active ETFs, retail-class mutual funds, institutional-class mutual funds, and index mutual funds. The active ETF portfolio stands out with the highest returns and Sharpe ratio and consistently higher alphas in the factor models. It exhibits more prominent performance in downtrend markets and in recent years, whereas its peer retail-class mutual fund portfolio has consistently shown inferior performance. The passive ETF and the index mutual fund portfolios have never surpassed the performance of the active ETF portfolio. Neither choosing the cheap index strategy nor paying for high-cost mutual fund managers proves to be the optimal option for investors. The outperforming portfolio is found to be active ETFs, which sheds light on the continuing surge in their fund flows.

The Effects of Past Behavioral Bias on Mutual Fund Investors Intention: Examining the Moderating Impact of Knowledge

This study aims to understand individual behavioral intentions toward mutual fund investors using the theory of planned behavior (TPB). Financial knowledge is used as a moderating variable to test the relationship between the antecedents of investment intention. Convenience sampling was used to obtain 236 samples. Statistical analyses were performed using the SPSS and AMOS software. The research discovered that subjective norms and perceived behavioral control had a substantial impact on individuals’ intention to invest. Financial knowledge is positively moderated by the antecedents of investment intentions. This study suggests that following the initial phases of decision-making, investors seek information from a variety of sources, including feedback from family and friends, podcasts, social media, and prior experiences. Marketers and financial advisors should educate investors of all ages and education groups on where and how to select and build portfolios of mutual funds in financial markets.

Investment Portfolio and Performance of Mutual Funds in Nigeria

Investment Portfolio and Performance of Mutual Funds in Nigeria

Mutual fund investment performance: Indonesia Sharia stock index as characteristics moderating model

Purpose – This study investigates how the Sharia stock price index influences the relationship between various factors, such as the expense ratio, portfolio turnover ratio, cash ratio, age, size, and characteristics of Sharia mutual funds, and their overall performance. Methodology – This study employed a quantitative descriptive research method to analyze 316 populations. Purposive sampling was used to obtain a total of 51 samples. We used research tools for data collection and SMART PLS 4 statistical software to analyze the collected data. Findings – The characteristics of ISSI-moderated mutual funds have a significant positive effect on the performance of Sharia mutual funds. To achieve better performance, investment managers must incur high costs in implementing active strategies. The more active the investment manager is in trading by looking at existing opportunities, the better the performance of the Sharia Mutual Funds. Implications – The implications of this research indicate that the movement of the Sharia stock price index can strengthen the positive causal relationship between several characteristics of Sharia mutual funds. The effects of Sharia mutual fund portfolio instruments, including shares, bonds, and deposits from the Sharia banking industry, also contribute to improving the performance of Sharia mutual funds in Indonesia.Originality – This study investigates the moderating role of the Sharia stock price index on several characteristics of Sharia mutual funds, including the expense ratio, portfolio turnover ratio, cash ratio, age of the mutual funds, and size of the mutual funds, in relation to their performance.

The influence of emotional intelligence and behavioural biases on mutual fund churning frequency: Evidence from India

Behavioural finance invalidates the rationalistic assumptions of the efficient market hypothesis by proposing a realistic explanation for overreaction and underreaction. These phenomena are caused by investors making financial decisions based on their emotions without realizing them. This study attempts to establish the effect of investors' emotional intelligence on behavioural biases, namely, herding, overconfidence bias, and disposition effects, and its consequences for the churning frequency of mutual fund portfolios. This quantitative cross-sectional study was undertaken to collect data from 499 mutual fund investors using a self-administered questionnaire. We found that the disposition effect has a negative impact and that overconfidence bias positively affects the churning frequency of mutual fund portfolios. Furthermore, emotional intelligence, particularly its subconstructs, affects herding bias and overconfidence bias, ultimately impacting the churning frequency of investors. An investor with a higher level of self-motivation is likely to have a disposition effect and herding bias. Investors with disposition impact may be encouraged to reorganize their portfolio if there are any schemes that have been providing negative returns for more than two years or that are not projected to offer significant returns in the future. By understanding how they stack up on each emotional intelligence metric, investors and financial advisors may focus on avoiding the biases that could jeopardize long-term portfolio returns.

MUTUAL FUND PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

Abstract — Mutual funds serve as popular investment vehicles due to their potential for diversification and professional management. However, choosing the right funds and optimizing one’s portfolio allocation can be complex. This project presents a comprehensive Mutual Fund Portfolio Analysis system designed to assist investors in making informed decisions. The system allows users to input their mutual fund holdings, tracking them over time to assess performance. It offers a range of analytical tools, including portfolio diversification analysis, risk assessment, and comparison against relevant benchmark indices. These features provide investors with a holistic view of their portfolio’s performance and risk profile. Moreover, the system employs advanced algorithms to generate personalized recommendations for optimizing the portfolio based on the user’s investment goals and risk tolerance. These recommendations aim to enhance returns while managing risk effectively. By utilizing this system, investors can gain deeper insights into their mutual fund investments, enabling them to make well-informed decisions. Ultimately, this project aims to empower investors to achieve their financial goals through strategic mutual fund portfolio management. Keywords – Mutual funds, Portfolio analysis, Investment decisions, Diversification, Risk assessment, Benchmark comparison, Portfolio optimization, Investment goals, Risk tolerance.

Asset Allocation Strategies: A Case Study in Mutual Fund and Inaurance Portfolios in Wallet Wealth LLP

This case study explores effective asset allocation strategies, focusing on mutual funds and insurance portfolios, with an emphasis on incorporating a de-risking factor. It underscores the importance of strategic asset allocation customised to each person’s risk profiles, Investing objectives, and temporal horizons . By utilizing mutual funds and insurance products, investors can construct diversified portfolios to mitigate risk and optimize returns. The study examines how different combinations of these instruments can enhance portfolio resilience and performance. Moreover, the integration of a de-risking factor adds a dynamic element to distribution of assets. This entails modifying the asset in the portfolio. mix depending on the state of the market and risk preferences to minimize downside risk and capture upside potential. Through historical analysis and scenario simulations, the study evaluates the efficacy of various asset allocation strategies, highlighting the benefits of incorporating a de-risking approach. It demonstrates how this strategy can protect capital during market downturns while capitalizing on growth opportunities in favorable market conditions.

An Examination of Mutual Fund Portfolios and Their Influencing Element

This study aims to provide light on the inner workings of mutual funds and portfolio analysis. Determine the ups and downs of mutual fund NAVs in respect to this study. Eliminating the mutual fund business would have a devastating effect on the Indian economy. The extraordinarily unpredictable Indian market has made mutual funds, which were formerly thought of as a safe investment option, considerably riskier. Market volatility and an excessive dependence on foreign markets are two global market characteristics that could affect them, as they do other financial organizations. Keywords:- Mutual Fund, Their influencing, Element, Portfolios, Examination

Trump's Tweeting Sentiment, Mutual Fund Portfolio, and Investor Preference

Trump's Tweeting Sentiment, Mutual Fund Portfolio, and Investor Preference

Can equity mutual funds outperform the benchmark and simple passive portfolios?

This study evaluates the risk-adjusted performance of equity mutual funds in Nigeria against the market benchmark and two alternative passive portfolios available to investors. Data on monthly net asset values (NAVs) of 30 actively managed, equity-based mutual funds that operated in Nigeria between 2012 and 2021 were collected and analyzed. Risk-adjusted performance measures including the Treynor ratio, Sharpe ratio, Jensen’s alpha, information ratio, Modigliani–Modigliani (M2) measure, Sortino ratio, and the Fama-French 3-factor regression model are used to evaluate the performance of mutual funds. Evidence shows that the Nigerian equity mutual fund portfolio does not deliver excess risk-adjusted returns, and underperforms the three simple passive portfolios against which it was benchmarked. However, mutual fund portfolios provide robust, low-cost diversification benefits and could be considered as part of a well-diversified portfolio of assets. This study explores investment strategies, with practical implications for investors, industry professionals, regulation, and academia. It provides a useful guide to retail investors and their advisers on managing their investment portfolios in the Nigerian stock market. In addition, it validates the veracity of the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH), implying that, on average, seeking alpha is, perhaps, a futile effort.

Active vs. passive, the case of sector equity funds

This paper examines performance of 95 actively managed U.S. sector equity mutual funds from 29 fund families relative to their peer exchange-traded funds, SPDR sector ETFs, in the period of 2008 to 2017. Our results do not show considerable evidence that actively managed sector mutual funds outperform their passive counterparties. None of the mutual fund portfolios produces a signifi- cant positive alpha through factor models or delivers a significant positive alpha against their peer ETFs. When focusing on the nine oldest actively managed Fidelity sector mutual funds, outperform- ance in the period of 1999–2010, which is reported in literature, appears to fade away during the pe- riod of 2011-2017. Alpha analyses of a larger sample of 60 sector mutual funds show similar performance deterioration in the same 19-year period. The results indicate that U.S. sector equity market has become more efficient in the past decade.

Machine learning and fund characteristics help to select mutual funds with positive alpha

Machine-learning methods exploit fund characteristics to select tradable long-only portfolios of mutual funds that earn significant out-of-sample annual alphas of 2.4% net of all costs. The methods unveil interactions in the relation between fund characteristics and future performance. For instance, past performance is a particularly strong predictor of future performance for more active funds. Machine learning identifies managers whose skill is not sufficiently offset by diseconomies of scale, consistent with informational frictions preventing investors from identifying the outperforming funds. Our findings demonstrate that investors can benefit from active management, but only if they have access to sophisticated prediction methods.

When school ties meet geography: Education-province bias in mutual fund portfolios

Fund managers tilt towards stocks from the location of their tertiary education (education province). We find that, compared with their peers, fund managers overweight stocks headquartered in their education provinces. This overweighting differs from other biases, such as local bias, hometown bias, and educational ties, and is detrimental to fund performance. Funds with more education-province bias have poorer fund performance and higher idiosyncratic risk than those with less bias. Further analysis shows that education-province bias is more evident during poor market times, among underperforming funds, for stocks with less information asymmetry, in economically depressed provinces, and when fund managers are educated at lower-ranked institutes. Overall, our findings suggest that education-province bias is largely attributed to fund managers’ familiarity bias.

The Dollar Cost Averaging, Lump Sum, and Value Averaging Strategies in Mutual Fund Investments

Investment strategy and portfolio management are crucial considerations when investing in mutual funds. This research aims to analyze the effectiveness of achieving optimal returns by simulating dollar cost averaging, lump sum, and value averaging approaches. This analysis is conducted about the performance of a mutual fund portfolio, utilizing the Sharpe and Treynor methods. The research sample employs a purposive sampling technique, selecting the top 5 mutual funds in terms of performance, managed by different investment managers in the year 2022. Simulations are being conducted over three specific periods. In addition to mutual funds, a comparative analysis was conducted involving the Jakarta Composite Index (JCI) and 10-year government bond yields (SUN). The simulation results on equity funds for the three periods indicate that the Lump Sum investment method outperforms dollar cost averaging and value averaging, particularly over 6 years. This finding is further corroborated by the Kruskal-Wallis test, which highlights a significant variance in return performance. The results of the Sharpe and Treynor investment methods exhibit significant differences, as confirmed by the Mann-Whitney test. Lastly, regarding benchmark comparisons, the performance of equity funds surpasses that of the benchmark.

Differential treatment in the bond market: Sovereign risk and mutual fund portfolios

How do international investors adjust their portfolios in response to sovereign risk? We answer this question by combining data on default probabilities for 31 developed and emerging markets with monthly data on the portfolios of individual bond mutual funds. We show that bond funds reduce their exposure to a country when sovereign default risk increases, indicating that changes in yields do not fully compensate investors for additional sovereign risk. We find that the magnitude of the response is heterogeneous. Portfolio weights of high-risk countries are more sensitive to sovereign risk, while core developed markets appear to enjoy preferential treatment, with their portfolio weights little affected by sovereign risk. Fund characteristics, such as past performance, also affect sensitivity to sovereign risk. Finally, we document what determines the destination of reallocation flows. Funds shift their assets to countries outside the immediate geographic region while avoiding markets to which they are heavily exposed.

International Portfolio Choice with Frictions: Evidence from Mutual Funds

Abstract Using data on international equity portfolio allocations by U.S. mutual funds, we estimate a portfolio expression derived from a standard mean-variance portfolio model extended with portfolio frictions. The optimal portfolio depends on the previous month and the buy-and-hold portfolio shares, and a present discounted value of expected excess returns. We estimate expected return differentials and use them in the portfolio regressions. The estimates imply significant portfolio frictions and a modest rate of risk aversion. While mutual fund portfolios significantly respond to expected returns, portfolio frictions lead to a weaker and a more gradual portfolio response to changes in expected returns. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Identifying influential financial stocks using simulation with a two-layer network

Risk spillover from one stock to another tends to create a contagion effect in the stock market. Fire sales due to the overlapping portfolios of mutual funds can amplify the contagion risks, leading to a downward spiral of stock prices. In this paper, we simulate this downward spiral phenomenon for the Chinese financial stocks based on a two-layer network structure and aim to identify the influential financial stocks based on their individual induced systemic risks. Our findings show that stock liquidity and the concentration of funds’ holding on stocks play important roles in determining systemically important financial institutions. Our results also confirm the statements of “too-big-to-fail” and “too-interconnected-to-fail” of financial institutions in the Chinese market. Our results show that a more sensitive flow-performance relationship of mutual funds can amplify the contagion risk by 41%. However, the magnitude can be more drastic in a low market liquidity scenario, where the contagion risk is boosted by 160%.

Optimizing Investment Portfolio of a State-Owned Company Pension Fund

The Pension Fund of PT Pos Indonesia (Dapenpos) is considering cutting off all its stock from the portfolio and trying to find the optimal portfolio to increase the funding ratio level. This research is using Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) by Markowitz to solve the current issue faced by the company by optimizing company’s current portfolio, company’s stock universe, and optimizing modified portfolio of company. Portfolio optimization of the company is complying to the OJK regulation as well as company’s investment direction with constant government bond proportion of 30% and unchanged proportion of both direct investment and property assets. The historical existing portfolio of Dapenpos from 2017 to 2021 has an expected return of 8.83% with standard deviation of 3.45%, so it is suggested that both mutual fund and stock portfolio should be emptied and reallocated to time deposit and corporate bond. The efficient frontier from current portfolio optimization indicated that Dapenpos could get a higher return of 9.31% by choosing portfolio above the optimal frontier. The optimal LQ45 index has a range of return from 6.90% as its Global Minimum Variance (GMV) to 27.46% as its optimal portfolio suggestion. GMV LQ45 is the preferable portfolio to modify the existing portfolio, with an optimal modified portfolio expected retrurn’s range of 7.37% to 9.28%. The decision of the fund manager to cut all the stock from its portfolio is validated by MPT tools with strategic reallocation to time deposit and corporate bond in gaining potential higher return with similar risk.

The green and Brown performances of mutual fund portfolios

The past decade has seen an increasing interest in socially responsible investing (SRI) in the mutual fund industry. Central to this development is whether SRI funds underperform conventional funds. Using a novel approach and a sample of 2,255 mutual funds, we decompose fund portfolios into socially responsible (green) and non-socially responsible (brown) components. We find that, in comparison to the non-socially responsible component, the socially responsible portion exhibits a lower raw return, lower risk-adjusted return (alpha), lower Sharpe ratio, and similar degree of performance reversal. The magnitude of this underperformance is, however, relatively small. The results align with SRI having a limited negative impact on fund performance while potentially offering some diversification benefits.

Impact of Financial Benchmarks Upon the Portfolio Distribution of Mutual Funds: The Evidence from Turkish Capital Market

The purpose of the study is to examine how financial benchmark returns impact the portfolio distribution of mutual funds. The scope of paper is limited to Turkish mutual funds market. Method employed in the paper; Granger Causality Test based on the VAR model is used. Findings of the quantitative analysis: As the return on government debt securities (index) inclines, the demand on Government Domestic Debt Securities goes up, and then, weight of government debt securities increases in consolidated portfolio of mutual funds. The paper concludes that for bonds, benchmark returns are effective on portfolio distribution of mutual funds.