Lipper Research Studies Reports

"Beating the Benchmark"

lipperclientservices@thomsonreuters.com — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Research examining how successful actively managed mutual funds in Europe have been in out-performing indices over the past twenty years.

Lipper Research Studies - Ruling Out New Funds: Wrong Decision?

lipperclientservices@thomsonreuters.com — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0600

• The majority of institutional investors exclude from their selection radar mutual funds that have not accumulated a track record of at least three years and that have not achieved a certain level of assets under management.

• We test if the track record criteria make sense from a performance-and-risk point of view. We compare groups of newly launched funds and funds with track records of over three years. Also, we look at whether fund managers achieve better or worse results at the beginning of their fund’s lifetime.

• We find no evidence that funds with long track records enjoy better performance or incur less risk than new funds. On the contrary our empirical data suggest that newly launched funds post higher average total returns and lower risk data.

• We also find that fund managers enjoy slightly better performance during the first year of their tenures.

Bestinfond Unwrapped September 2010

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Bestinfond is a Spain-domiciled equity fund investing in European equities which has enjoyed outstanding performance over the last five years.

We perform a detailed quantitative analysis encompassing performance, risk, style, expenses and holdings attribution. We find that:

Bestinfond achieved outstanding absolute returns and performance adjusted for risk.

Expense analysis showed a lower total expense ratio (TER) and relatively high portfolio turnover.

The manager was very successful at stock selection but asset allocation in terms of countries or sectors added little value or on occasion had a negative contribution.

The best active returns (outperformance) compared to the MSCI Europe Small Cap index were achieved in the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. On the other hand, stock picking in the U.K. was poor.

The holdings profile of the fund showed a strong decreasing allocation trend to Spain and a rising one to the equity markets of countries such as Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland. The fund lived up to its value style focus.