The investment in mutual funds has steadily increased in this decade. This growth has created a need for comprehensive and expandable financial decision support systems (DSS) that embody the knowledge of an expert in making investment decisions. This study illustrates the design and development of an intelligent, object-oriented decision support system: MFS -–Mutual Fund Selector. MFS takes int...

This paper …nds that fund herding, de…ned as the tendency of a mutual fund to follow past aggregate institutional trades, is an important predictor of mutual fund performance. Examining actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds over the period 1990-2009, we …nd that funds with a higher herding tendency achieve lower future returns. The performance gap between herding and antiherding funds is pe...

I evaluate the economic consequences of advisory misconduct by estimating the effect of publicly disclosed regulatory actions of mutual fund advisors on fund flows. Based on misconduct events from 2000-2013, I find a 5% reduction in fund flows to malfeasant advisors in one year following the misconduct. Further analysis using the 2001 SEC electronic filing mandate as a positive shock to miscond...

We classify mutual funds using cluster analysis and examine whether the categories created by clusters are the same as those assigned by the invest ment objectives Since mutual funds are usually classi ed based on their investment objectives clustering funds based on their nancial characteris tics rather than their investment objectives could explain why some mutual funds do not perform accordi...

The mutual fund industry has experienced huge growth internationally, becoming one of the primary vehicles through which individuals and most institutions invest in capital markets. Thus, the evaluation of the performance of mutual funds has become a very interesting research topic both for academic researchers for managers of financial, banking and investment institutions. This paper proposes ...

In this paper I analyze investors’ reactions to changes in the expense ratios of equity mutual funds. I show that investment flows’ response to fees cannot be fully explained by looking at investors’ performance sensitivity. While performance sensitivity monotonically increases with past performance, price sensitivity does not: investors who buy top past performers seem to be “distracted” by th...