Using downside risk in evaluating the performance of Malaysian mutual funds

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide the modified measures of risk-adjusted performance evaluation of Malaysian mutual funds using the downside risk concepts, and promote the ability of managers and investors in making logical decisions under the market asymmetry condition. Design/methodology/approach – This study focusses on the performance evaluation of Malaysian mutual funds using eight modified measures of Sharpe, Treynor, M 2, Jensen’s α , information ratio (IR), MSR, SPI, and leverage factor. These modified measures use the downside systematic risk and semi-standard deviation instead of systematic risk and conventional standard deviation, respectively, to evaluate the performance of Malaysian mutual funds over the period 2000-2011. Findings – The results indicate that the conventional measures of performance evaluation do not have a crucial influence on the relative evaluation of mutual funds. Three modified measures of Sharpe, Treynor, and M 2 have a high correlation with the conventional Sharpe measure and can be used instead of the conventional Sharpe measure. Since, two modified measures of Treynor and M 2 display a high rank correlation coefficient with the conventional Treynor measure, they can be replaced with this traditional measure. In addition, two modified IR and MSR measures along with the modified SPI and conventional SPI show very high rank correlation coefficients in relation to each other. The results also document a modified leverage factor less than one for all funds. It can be concluded that the strategy of un-levering the investor’s holding must be followed. Practical implications – The empirical evidence of this study can be utilized as inputs in the process of decision-making by different types of investors who are interested in participating especially in Malaysian stock market and generally in global stock market under the market asymmetry condition. Originality/value – The contribution of this study is to modify five measures of M 2, IR, MSR, FPI, and leverage factor in the downside risk framework which is a work on a rather under-researched area.