1. Throughout this paper, references to “investment manager” and “manager” may also apply to a mutual fund. 2. For definitions of key terms used in this paper, please see the Glossary on page 8. This paper dissects the portfolio construction process, providing insights on successful practices. If you have not done so already, you can work with your Financial Advisor or Private Wealth Advisor to...

Purpose – This paper seeks to promote an understanding of gender effects on retirement plan participation as a function of fund assortment size. Design/methodology/approach – A decision simulation was conducted among 349 US adults whose task was to invest in a hypothetical 401(k) retirement plan. The number of mutual funds offered for investment was varied and the effects on the incidence and e...

Financial support from IFM2 and SSHRC are gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies. Please do not quote without the authors' permission. Abstract. We study M&A activity in the US mutual fund industry over the period 1962-2009. Any improvement in abnormal performance around M&As accrues primarily to target unitholders. The risk level of acquirers increases around such transactions. ...

Our investment strategy for the world mutual funds can be divided into three main parts. First, the global trend indicator (GTI) is defined for evaluating the price change trend of the funds in the future. Then, based on GTI, we derive the monitoring indicator (MI) to measure whether the fund market is in the bull or bear state. Finally, to decide the signal for buying or selling funds, a genet...

We reveal pitfalls in the hedging of insurance contracts with a minimum return guarantee on the underlying investment, e.g. an external mutual fund. We analyze basis risk entailed by hedging the guarantee with a dynamic portfolio of proxy assets for the funds. We also take account of liquidity risk which arises since the insurer may need to advance funds for performing the hedge. Based on a lea...

Financial services firms everywhere have undergone major changes over the last several decades. These firms include retail commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, mutual fund companies, securities brokers, and credit card companies. The decade of the nineties has witnessed a significant number of mergers among these firms worldwide. Some mergers were intended to achieve economi...

The mutual fund industry manages about a quarter of the assets in the U.S. stock market and thus plays an important role in the U.S. economy. The question of how much control is concentrated in the hands of the largest players can be quantitatively discussed in terms of the tail behavior of the mutual fund size distribution. We study the distribution empirically and show that the tail is better...

This paper investigates whether the business relations between mutual funds and brokerage firms influence sell-side analyst recommendations. Using a unique data set that discloses brokerage firms’ commission income derived from each mutual fund client as well as the share holdings of these mutual funds, we find that an analyst’s recommendation on a stock relative to consensus is significantly h...

The present paper investigates the performance of open-ended, growth-oriented equity schemes for the period from April 2011 to March 2015 of transition economy. Daily closing NAV of different schemes have been used to calculate the returns from the fund schemes. BSE-sensex has been used for market portfolio. The historical performance of the selected schemes were evaluated on the basis of Sharp...