Brown, Stephen J. and Sotes-Paladino, Juan and Yao, Yaqiong and Wang, Jiaguo (2016) Starting on the Wrong Foot : Seasonality in Mutual Fund Performance. In: The 28th Asian FA Annual Meeting 2016, 2016-06-26 - 2016-06-28, Anantara Siam Bangkok Hotel.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
We document a marked seasonal pattern in the aggregate underperformance of active mutual funds. On average, a value-weighted portfolio of active funds underperforms the market and other benchmark portfolios in the first month of a quarter only. This intra-quarter pattern remains significant across fund size and investment style categories. It is partially consistent with tournament-like behavior (quarter-end NAV inflation and window dressing) by mutual funds, but bears limited to no relation with systematic time variation in microstructure biases, investors’ flows or cash distributions. Our results pose a challenge to existing explanations of the mutual funds’ underperformance puzzle.