IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-14-00478.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

European equity fund managers: luck or skill?!

Author

Listed:
  • Enareta Kurtbegu

    (University of Evry-Val d''Essonne, EPEE and TEPP-CNRS)

  • Juliana Caicedo-llano

    (University of Evry-Val d''Essonne, EPEE, TEPP-CNRS and EONOS Investment Technologies)

Abstract

Seeking persistent abnormal portfolio performance has been a key question for academics and practitioners. The main challenge in the construction of fund-of-funds is the ex-ante selection of "skilled" managers, ex-post outperforming the benchmark. This empirical study focused on European mutual funds, consists in using the False Discovery Rate selecting procedure. The standard tests to identify funds with non-zero alphas do not adequately account for the presence of "luck", while this becomes an important issue when one deals with multiple testing. Different pricing models are used and the performance of constructed fund-of-funds is analyzed in-sample and out-of-sample for different investment strategies.

Suggested Citation

  • Enareta Kurtbegu & Juliana Caicedo-llano, 2014. "European equity fund managers: luck or skill?!," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 34(4), pages 2340-2350.
  • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-14-00478
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2014/Volume34/EB-14-V34-I4-P213.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Laurent Barras & Olivier Scaillet & Russ Wermers, 2010. "False Discoveries in Mutual Fund Performance: Measuring Luck in Estimated Alphas," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 65(1), pages 179-216, February.
    2. Robert Kosowski & Allan Timmermann & Russ Wermers & Hal White, 2006. "Can Mutual Fund “Stars” Really Pick Stocks? New Evidence from a Bootstrap Analysis," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 61(6), pages 2551-2595, December.
    3. Cuthbertson, Keith & Nitzsche, Dirk & O'Sullivan, Niall, 2008. "UK mutual fund performance: Skill or luck?," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 15(4), pages 613-634, September.
    4. Michael Wolf & Dan Wunderli, 2009. "Fund-of-funds construction by statistical multiple testing methods," IEW - Working Papers 445, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich.
    5. Carhart, Mark M, 1997. "On Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(1), pages 57-82, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Blake, David & Caulfield, Tristan & Ioannidis, Christos & Tonks, Ian, 2014. "Improved inference in the evaluation of mutual fund performance using panel bootstrap methods," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 183(2), pages 202-210.
    2. Chen, Li-Wen & Adams, Andrew & Taffler, Richard, 2013. "What style-timing skills do mutual fund “stars” possess?," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(C), pages 156-173.
    3. Omneya Abdelsalam & Meryem Duygun & Juan Carlos Matallín-Sáez & Emili Tortosa-Ausina, 2014. "Is Ethical Money Sensitive to Past Returns? The Case of Portfolio Constraints and Persistence of Islamic and Socially Responsible Funds," Working Papers 2014/19, Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain).
    4. Francesco Lisi, 2011. "Dicing with the market: randomized procedures for evaluation of mutual funds," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(2), pages 163-172.
    5. Huang, Rong & Pilbeam, Keith & Pouliot, William, 2021. "Do actively managed US mutual funds produce positive alpha?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 182(C), pages 472-492.
    6. Omneya Abdelsalam & Meryem Duygun & Juan Carlos Matallín-Sáez & Emili Tortosa-Ausina, 2017. "Is Ethical Money Sensitive to Past Returns? The Case of Portfolio Constraints and Persistence in Islamic Funds," Journal of Financial Services Research, Springer;Western Finance Association, vol. 51(3), pages 363-384, June.
    7. Ayadi, Mohamed A. & Kryzanowski, Lawrence, 2011. "Fixed-income fund performance: Role of luck and ability in tail membership," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 18(3), pages 379-392, June.
    8. Keith Pilbeam & Hamish Preston, 2019. "An Empirical Investigation of the Performance of Japanese Mutual Funds: Skill or Luck?," IJFS, MDPI, vol. 7(1), pages 1-16, January.
    9. Huang, Rong & Asteriou, Dimitrios & Pouliot, William, 2020. "A reappraisal of luck versus skill in the cross-section of mutual fund returns," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 176(C), pages 166-187.
    10. Dimitrios Koutmos & Bochen Wu & Qi Zhang, 2020. "In search of winning mutual funds in the Chinese stock market," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 54(2), pages 589-616, February.
    11. Cuthbertson, Keith & Nitzsche, Dirk & O'Sullivan, Niall, 2022. "Mutual fund performance persistence: Factor models and portfolio size," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    12. Parshakov, Petr, 2015. "Estimation of skill of Russian mutual fund managers," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 37(1), pages 57-66.
    13. Agyei-Ampomah, Sam & Clare, Andrew & Mason, Andrew & Thomas, Stephen, 2015. "On luck versus skill when performance benchmarks are style-consistent," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 127-145.
    14. Kim, Sangbae & In, Francis & Ji, Philip Inyeob & Park, Raphael Jonghyeon, 2014. "False discoveries in the performance of Australian managed funds," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 26(C), pages 244-256.
    15. Yi, Li & He, Lei, 2016. "False discoveries in style timing of Chinese mutual funds," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 194-208.
    16. Bangassa, Kenbata & Su, Chen & Joseph, Nathan L., 2012. "Selectivity and timing performance of UK investment trusts," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 22(5), pages 1149-1175.
    17. Dimitrios G. Konstantinides & Georgios C. Zachos, 2019. "Exhibiting Abnormal Returns Under a Risk Averse Strategy," Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, Springer, vol. 21(2), pages 551-566, June.
    18. Ioannis D Vrontos & Loukia Meligkotsidou & Spyridon D Vrontos, 2011. "Performance evaluation of mutual fund investments: The impact of non-normality and time-varying volatility," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 12(4), pages 292-307, September.
    19. Grønborg, Niels S. & Lunde, Asger & Timmermann, Allan & Wermers, Russ, 2021. "Picking funds with confidence," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 139(1), pages 1-28.
    20. Cai, Biqing & Cheng, Tingting & Yan, Cheng, 2018. "Time-varying skills (versus luck) in U.S. active mutual funds and hedge funds," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 81-106.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Fund-of-Funds; Factor Models; False Discovery Rate; Performance;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C4 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics
    • G1 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-14-00478. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.