Dynamic strategy and performance of german equity and bond mutual funds (PDF)

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction:
Measuring performance of fund managers is a topic equally interesting to practitioners and researchers. Most common performance measures rely on the assumption of constant risk during the entire evaluation period. The measure of risk is the beta from the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). In order to better assess a manager¿s investment ability, additional factors could be employed to capture the different sources of risk. The manager owes each portion of the achieved return to a certain risk factor. The risks a manager is running can be summed up to form his personal benchmark, which thus reflects the investment style. Still, the exposures to the included risk factors are assumed to be constant.
The dynamics of the capital markets had not been captured by the prevailing performance measures before an approach that controlled for varying economic conditions was suggested. Models that are based on this approach deliver a beta conditional on the market state. The manager¿s exposure to the risk of the own benchmark was thus allowed to vary in time. Consequently, the search for indicators of the market states was launched and a model framework which could accommodate the chosen indicators as part of the benchmark had to be chosen. Two model frameworks emerged and a couple of indicators established themselves as standard. This study largely follows the approach of Ferson and Schadt. They introduced a linear model that can be perceived as a conditional version of the CAPM.
The aim of this study is not only to obtain performance measures which result from the conditional models. Since the variation in the exposure to market risk is accounted for, one who employs conditional models gains insight into fund manager¿s trading. If the trading is reflected in changes of the beta, then inference on fund strategy is made possible even though information on the portfolio structure is not provided. The explanatory power of a conditional model depends on the researcher selecting a representative benchmark for the funds in the sample and indicators of economic conditions that fund managers rely on in reality.
The structure of this paper is the following: chapter 2 builds the theoretical foundation of conditional models and presents their two forms; chapter 3 relates this study to previous literature in the area; chapter 4 employs conditional models to evaluate strategies and performance of German fund managers; chapter 5 sums up the [...]