The top 5% of actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds in 2012 had greater aggregate TNA than the remaining 95% of funds combined. This skewness in size has implications for mutual fund research: What is true of the average fund is not necessarily true of the average dollar. We explore several...

Mutual funds’ maximum drawdowns (MDDs) are persistent, indicative of manager skill, and predictive of subsequent performance. Among funds with relatively strong past performance, those with relatively low past MDDs, on average, have an out-of-sample alpha of 2.40% per year. That alpha is...

The value of exchange traded fund (ETF) assets has increased from $66 billion in 2000 to almost a trillion dollars in 2010. We use this massive expansion in ETF assets to study what drives ETF flows. Using a data set of over 500 ETFs from 2001 to 2010, we show that ETF investors chase returns in...