We investigate the information source of active U.S. equity mutual funds’ value added using 234 public asset pricing anomalies. On average, mutual funds add value through their positive exposures to anomalies based on market information (e.g., momentum and liquidity risk) and lose value...

Active opportunity in the market, measured by cross-sectional dispersion in stock returns, significantly influences fund performance. Active strategies have the greatest impact on returns during periods of high dispersion, when alpha produced by the most active funds significantly exceeds that...

This chapter provides a perspective on the rapidly developing literature on investment performance evaluation. I use the stochastic discount factor approach to present and critique current performance measurement techniques in a unified setting. I offer a number of suggestions to improve...

We measure misvaluation using the discounted residual income model of Ohlson (1990, 1995). We show that there are significant returns on a long-short portfolio that buys under- and sells short overvalued shares. These returns are highly correlated with the Fama and French HML factor returns and...

Stocks with high sentiment betas are more sensitive to investor sentiment, with more subjective valuations. We contend that sentiment beta also captures the duration of mispricing. Accordingly, stocks with high (low) sentiment betas provide opportunities for momentum (contrarian) traders. We...

We document significant outperformance by government bond funds on important macro announcement days such as FOMC and GDP. The macro-day outperformance is persistent, larger during times of high macro disagreement and surprise, and stronger for active funds with larger idiosyncratic volatility....

We examine the relative weights hedge fund investors attach to past information in the fund selection process. The weighting scheme appears inconsistent with econometric forecasting models that predict fund returns, alphas or Sharpe ratios. In particular, investor flows are highly sensitive to...

We study the dynamics of fund manager ownership for a sample of U.S. equity mutual funds from 2005 to 2011. We find that ownership changes positively predict changes in future risk-adjusted fund performance. A one-standarddeviation increase in ownership predicts a 1.6 percent increase in alpha...

Quantitative research analysts (Quants) produce in-depth quantitative and econometric modeling of market anomalies to assist sell-side analysts and institutional clients with stock selection strategies. Quants are associated with more efficient analyst forecasting behavior on anomaly predictors...

We investigate the relationship between a mutual fund’s variation in systematic risk factor exposures and its future performance. Using a dynamic state space version of Carhart (1997)’s four factor model to capture risk factor variation, we find that funds with volatile risk factor exposures...