Analyzing Mutual Funds Performance: The Case of Emerging Mauritian Economy

This paper analyzes the performance of Mauritian mutual funds by initially investigating the performance of the mutual funds on a risk-adjusted basis and then on an individual basis with respect to their respective benchmark performances. The results show that the rankings obtained by applying both the Sharpe and Treynor rules are almost the same, implying that the funds appear to be well-diversified. Moreover, the majority of funds selected are reported to have a relatively high Sharpe ratio, thus indicating a pretty good performance. However, the positive Jensen’s alpha indicates that fund managers through their stock picking skills, privileged information or intuition have ‘beaten the market’. Individual analysis revealed that funds are heavily dependent on the performance of the local stock market, that is, they move in line with the market index. Interestingly, those mutual funds investing heavily in the local stock market are reported to ‘beat the market’.