This article examines the risk and return characteristics of U.S. mutual funds. We employ an equilibrium version of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) and a principal-components-based statistical technique to identify performance benchmarks. We also consider the Capital Asset Pricing Model...

We refine the approximate factor model of asset returns by distinguishing between natural rate factors, whose sum of squared factor betas grow at the same rate as the number of assets, and semi-strong factors, whose sum of squared factor betas grow to infinity, but at a slower rate. We...