We deconstruct the active share measure proposed by Cremers and Petajisto (2009) and find two-thirds of the outperformance of high active share mutual funds can be attributed to the ability of those funds to select out-of-benchmark stocks. However, that ability is limited to high active share...

Just over 20 years have passed since the publication of Carhart's landmark 1997 study on mutual funds. Its conclusion—that the data did “not support the existence of skilled or informed mutual fund portfolio managers”—was the capstone of an academic literature beginning with Jensen...

One dollar in purchases or redemptions generates an average cost of $0.006 for U.S. equity mutual funds during the period 1997-2009, approximately 70% lower than prior estimates derived from older data. However, large cross-sectional differences exist between funds. Many funds have costs near...

Mutual fund managers should choose to increase the concentration of their portfolio when they possess information of great enough expected value to offset the risks of increased concentration. Consistent with that idea, we find that fund performance improves after concentration increases....

We introduce a new holdings-based procedure to identify whether a mutual fund has a benchmark discrepancy, which we define as a benchmark other than the prospectus benchmark best matching a fund's investment strategy. We find that funds with a benchmark discrepancy tend to be riskier than their...

We use a novel sample of separate accounts to perform an out-of-sample test of the predictive power of active share (Cremers and Petajisto, 2009). While active share has limited predictive power unconditionally, it has significant power conditional on past performance. We find strong positive...

The addition of the Fama and French (2015) profitability (RMW) and investment (CMA) factors to the standard four-factor model reveals persistent positive alpha after fees for mutual funds. Over the period 2000-2014, about 65 percent of fund managers have at least some skill, and about 15 percent...

I use exchange traded funds to construct low cost benchmarks for actively managed mutual funds. The benchmarks can be identified in advance, require no leverage or shorting, and require only annual rebalancing. The average fund underperforms its benchmark by 1% per year after expenses, a...

On average, stocks with high prior-period volatility underperform those with low prior-period volatility, but that simple comparison paints an incomplete, and potentially misleading, picture. As we show, high volatility is an indicator of both positive and negative future abnormal performance....

We find the low volatility anomaly is present in all but the smallest of stocks. Portfolios can be formed on either total or idiosyncratic volatility to take advantage of this anomaly, but we show measures of idiosyncratic volatility are key. Standard risk-adjusted returns suggest that there is...