Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 7.5, Maastricht University, language: English, abstract: The following study examines the performance of mutual funds investing in small cap companies in the period from 1990 until 2013. Therefore, funds investing in small companies in Germany are tested on their ability to deliver risk-adjusted abnormal returns. The returns are risk-adjusted according to Fama French (1996) three-factor model, Carhart four-factor model and the liquidity adjusted five-factor model of Pastor and Stambaugh (2003). A separate examination of the internet crisis 2000 until 2003 and the financial crisis period 2008 until 2013 is done, to assess the ability of fund managers in isolation to examine their results in situations when their skills are most needed. On average, I conclude that fund managers, investing in the small capitalization segment in Germany, are not able to outperform the market even before fees.

We examine the risk-adjusted performance of open-end mutual funds which invest mainly in German stocks. After briefly discussing the institutional environment in which these funds operate, we focus on the benchmark problem and the risk adjustment problem. Our data set includes all German funds sold to the public in 1972, our performance analysis covers the time period 1973 to 1998. In our empirical analysis, we first look at the rates of return of individual funds and at the unweighted average rates of return of all funds in our sample. When we apply the Sharpe and Jensen measure to the latter time series in the traditional way, the funds underperform the appropriate benchmarks by approximately 1.5% per year, which is significant both from the statistical and the economic perspective. Applying the Sharpe and the Jensen measure in the traditional way creates a bias from the perspective of long-term investors, because the analysis is based on the arithmetic, not the geometric mean return. To avoid this bias we look, in a second step, at the returns of investors who risk adjust their fund investments ex-ante by borrowing or lending with the objective, that the future risk of his levered portfolio matches that of the chosen benchmark. When we again apply the Sharpe and the Jensen measure to the unweighted average rates of return, the underperformance is reduced by 40%. For large funds, on the average, the underperformance is less than for small funds. When we look at the value-weighted means of individual fund returns, the underperformance nearly disappears.

Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 1,3, University of Regensburg (Centre of Finance), language: English, abstract: Financial markets are as complex as ever due to an accelerating development in the last decades. Especially evaluations of mutual fund performance have been a subject of interest since the introduction of financial services. In this thesis, a study on the performance of mutual funds investing in German equity from July 1995 to June 2015 is conducted. The aim is to find out if fund managers have sufficient skill to generate risk adjusted return in order to cover the cost imposed on the investors. Another purpose is to provide investors with relevant results. Inter alia, Jensen one-factor, Fama and French three-factor and the Carhart four-factor model are used as different benchmark models for performance. Paired bootstrap simulations suggest that, net of cost, a small fraction of fund managers do have sufficient skill to cover cost. For the bottom ranked funds, there is statistical evidence that their poor performance is caused by bad management, rather than by bad luck. The results for gross returns show that there is an unneglectable fraction of fund managers with good performance not due to luck. Compared to net returns, there is stronger evidence of skill, negative as well as positive. Form an investor’s point of view it seems rather beneficial to invest in passively managed vehicles. High costs eat into the return, and they are the main reason why the majority of actively managed funds end up with sub-par performance.

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Measuring performance of fund managers is a topic equally interesting to practitioners and researchers. Most common performance measures rely on the assumption of constant risk during the entire evaluation period. The measure of risk is the beta from the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). In order to better assess a manager s investment ability, additional factors could be employed to capture the different sources of risk. The manager owes each portion of the achieved return to a certain risk factor. The risks a manager is running can be summed up to form his personal benchmark, which thus reflects the investment style. Still, the exposures to the included risk factors are assumed to be constant. The dynamics of the capital markets had not been captured by the prevailing performance measures before an approach that controlled for varying economic conditions was suggested. Models that are based on this approach deliver a beta conditional on the market state. The manager s exposure to the risk of the own benchmark was thus allowed to vary in time. Consequently, the search for indicators of the market states was launched and a model framework which could accommodate the chosen indicators as part of the benchmark had to be chosen. Two model frameworks emerged and a couple of indicators established themselves as standard. This study largely follows the approach of Ferson and Schadt. They introduced a linear model that can be perceived as a conditional version of the CAPM. The aim of this study is not only to obtain performance measures which result from the conditional models. Since the variation in the exposure to market risk is accounted for, one who employs conditional models gains insight into fund manager s trading. If the trading is reflected in changes of the beta, then inference on fund strategy is made possible even though information on the portfolio structure is not provided. The explanatory power of a conditional model depends on the researcher selecting a representative benchmark for the funds in the sample and indicators of economic conditions that fund managers rely on in reality. The structure of this paper is the following: chapter 2 builds the theoretical foundation of conditional models and presents their two forms; chapter 3 relates this study to previous literature in the area; chapter 4 employs conditional models to evaluate strategies and performance of German fund managers; chapter 5 sums up the [...]

The purpose of this article is analyzing the performance of the mutual funds that invest solely in German stock market by using the seven different approaches of performance measures. These seven measures are the standard CAPM Jensen's alpha, the Sharpe's ratio, the Treynor's ratio, the Sortino ratio, the Fama's ratio, the Information ratio and Fama-French's three-factor model. The study investigates the performance measurement results and ranking of mutual funds for the period between January 2001 to December 2006. Moreover, the paper shows whether fund rankings according to the different measures are significantly correlated and whether the performance measures identify the same funds as the best and the worst performing funds over the sample period.