Composite Index Fund And The Fidelity�� Floating Rate High Income Fund

By analyzing the performance of the various mutual funds, it would help the company to establish its internal rules regarding the level or risk and return.

When an investor considers to investment money, the first challenge that almost every investor face is numerous options to choose from stocks, bonds, mutual funds & so on. “Equity is one the key asset class which beats inflation in the long run.” (The Times of India, 5th Feb 2015). “Equity mutual funds help investors generate better inflation-adjusted returns, without spending a lot of time and energy on it. While most people consider letting their savings 'grow ' in a bank, they don 't consider that inflation may be nibbling away its value.” (The Hindu, 14th March 2016). Purpose of this study is to analyze the past performance of three global equity mutual funds of State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) & Northern Trust (NT) on the basis of equivalent investment style, asset manager, historical returns & application of statistical tools. This will help in understanding performance of mutual funds in terms of risk & return, asset manager’s investment strategies & asset manager’s performance.

CFA Institute is the premier association for investment professionals around the world, with over 95,000 members in 134 countries. Since 1963 the organization has developed and administered the renowned Chartered Financial Analyst® Program. With a rich history of leading the investment profession, CFA Institute has set the highest standards in ethics, education, and professional excellence within the global investment community, and is the foremost authority on investment profession conduct and practice. Each book in the CFA Institute Investment Series is geared toward industry practitioners, along with graduate-level finance

As a team, we analyzed two individual securities, a fund, and the S&P 500 based on historical data. We found closing prices on a monthly basis for a total of 5 years for each security, fund, and index. As individual securities, we analyzed Lululemon Athletica (LULU) and Molina Healthcare (MOH). For our choice of fund, we analyzed USA Mutuals Vice Investor (VICEX). Finally, for the index, we analyzed the S&P 500. We took the historical data from yahoo finance and used Excel to find the Standard Deviations, Sharpe Ratios, HPR's, and regression analysis for each of the securities listed above.

Becoming major suppliers of funds in the financial market, mutual funds have become a very popular investment in recent years. Because of the diversity of investments, portfolio management’s expertise, and liquidity, mutual funds have grown rapidly over the past few years. One of the most popular group’s investing in mutual funds is people with self-driven retirement plans. This provides professionally handled money and pooled risk. There are more than 8,000 different mutual funds, with more than 88 million households owning shares of one or more.

The mutual fund is seeking to attain its objective by investing in a mix of stocks, bonds, and financial derivatives to hopefully maintain decently stable money inflows with securable low risks. The fund might not invest more than 20% in derivatives as a major tool to secure profits, as the rest of its assets in bonds and stocks with a 3-to-1 ratio to hedge away the risks. The fixed income securities the Fund invests in will generally have a maturity range from 1 year to 30 years. The fund may invest in fixed income securities of any credit quality, but primarily invests in securities with AA/A bonds to avoid the potential of the default risk. The total amount invested in securities that are

Chevalier and Ellison (1999), furthermore provides new access for the study of fund earnings, they tend to concern about fund managers, assume it is necessary to distinguish the returns of persistence and expression comes from the manipulation of managers or fund itself. Only when the fund manager is the main indicator of the yield of the fund, then funds can be selected from the perspective of managers, and help investors to identify the manager’s characteristic to select fund. Furthermore, they introduced SAT average score to evaluate whether the fund manager’s university is prestigious. Through least squares analysis, they noticed that the higher SAT score and younger manager have better achievement, and the fund administrator with MBA degrees have a greater chance of investing in better-growing stocks, compare with who without MBA, yet this variable has an insignificant effect on fund revenue.

Based on these results we could argue that the mutual funds do not follow the market closely, but both Managers over-perform the index. Furthermore, in order to test whether or not we have viable explanatory coefficients, a t-testing procedure was followed(Table 2). Using a 5% significance level, all coefficients except the market beta of Mutual Fund 1 are statistically significant. The low R2 in both mutual funds implies that their returns are less well explained by the Benchmark’s movements. However, Titman and Tiu(2011) suggest that low R-squares likely indicate more active management; either departing from a Benchmark or focusing on stocks with larger fractions of variance attributed to firm-specific information.

There has been a number of studies done on the Mutual funds and Equity holdings of a company but very little research has been done on the mutual funds using Active Share method. The research focusses on the KiwiSaver funds which is the superannuation scheme provided by private service providers but put into use by the government of New Zealand. The paper studies the returns of the KiwiSaver funds from the time period of 2010 till the recent update of 2015. It will be done against the benchmark indices of the equity holdings in the respective KiwiSaver funds to understand the most profitable schemes out of the different schemes available in the market.

Lease et al. (1974) tried to find out who the individual investor is, how he makes his decisions, how he is dealing with his broker and analysis of his asset portfolio among the US investors. With the help of a questionnaire, the investment strategies followed by investors were determined. The responses portrayed that the investors followed a fundamental approach preferring a balanced and well-diversified portfolio of income. It was found that investors preferred long-term capital appreciation securities withdividend income instead of short-term gains. The decision framework of investors revealed by their responses was that the groups preferred journals and newspapers as sources of information. The factors such as age, income level and sex

To provide better service for her present clients and to attract new clients, she has developed a weekly newsletter. Lisa has been considering adding a new feature to the newsletter that will report the results of a weekly telephone survey of fund managers. To investigate the feasibility of offering this service, and to determine what type of information to include in the newsletter, Lisa selected a sample random sample of 45 money market funds. The Data File “Bock”, reports fund assets and yields for the past seven and 30 days. Before calling the money market fund managers to obtain additional data, Lisa decided to do some preliminary analysis of the data already collected.

When it comes to investing, it is crucial to determine one’s risk tolerance, expectation for capital appreciation, income requirements, preferred portfolio volatility, time horizon, and of course, the expected overall potential return. These characteristics are generally summed together to form the investor profile of a particular investor. It will allow an individual to make clear of their goals and objectives, determine their comfort level with risks and uncertainties, as well as other valuable information necessary to make wise investment decisions in the future.

1. The returns used in this research are returns of mutual funds. So, we can only evaluate the stock-picking skill of all managers of funds, not skill of individual fund manager. 2. The returns used in this research are not the net returns, which already deducts management fee. So, there is possibility that the underperformed fund is caused by ineffective management of fund not from lack of manager‟s skill.

This particular section provides an overall comparison of performance of Islamic Mutual Funds, which is important to consider empirically especially taking into consideration the fact that the Islamic indexes provide different estimations for the performance of these mutual funds, particularly during bullish and bearish periods.

Extensive research has evaluated mutual fund performance in different financial markets which led to mixed results (Soderlind et al., 2000; Korkeamaki and Smythe, 2004); however, very limited work has been done to evaluate Bangladeshi mutual funds. This paper focused on measuring risk adjusted performance of 13 closed end mutual funds on the basis of monthly Net Asset Value. For this purpose methods suggested by Jensen, Treynor and Sharpe are employed. Performance of the selected funds found superior in compare to benchmark index. Furthermore diversification, market timing and selectivity skill of fund managers are