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Style Drift
Style drift occurs when a mutual fund's actual and declared investment style differs. A mutual fund’s declared investment style can be found in the fund prospectus which investors commonly rely upon to aid their investment decisions. For most investors, they assumed that mutual fund managers will invest according to the advertised guidelines, this is however, not the case for a fund with style drift. Style drift is commonplace in today’s mutual fund industry, making no distinction between developed and developing markets according to studies in the United States by Brown and Goetzmann (1997) and in China as reported in Sina Finance. When style drift presents in mutual fund, the investment information about the fund becomes misleading. Given that in reality, style drift is generally undetected, the information asymmetry of investment information has important consequences for fund investors seeking to maximize fund returns. Researchers such as Brown, Harlow and Zhang (2012) demons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mutual Fund
A mutual fund is a professionally managed investment fund that pools money from many investors to purchase securities. The term is typically used in the United States, Canada, and India, while similar structures across the globe include the SICAV in Europe ('investment company with variable capital') and open-ended investment company (OEIC) in the UK. Mutual funds are often classified by their principal investments: money market funds, bond or fixed income funds, stock or equity funds, or hybrid funds. Funds may also be categorized as index funds, which are passively managed funds that track the performance of an index, such as a stock market index or bond market index, or actively managed funds, which seek to outperform stock market indices but generally charge higher fees. Primary structures of mutual funds are open-end funds, closed-end funds, unit investment trusts. Open-end funds are purchased from or sold to the issuer at the net asset value of each share as of the close ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Financial Market
A financial market is a market in which people trade financial securities and derivatives at low transaction costs. Some of the securities include stocks and bonds, raw materials and precious metals, which are known in the financial markets as commodities. The term "market" is sometimes used for what are more strictly ''exchanges'', organizations that facilitate the trade in financial securities, e.g., a stock exchange or commodity exchange. This may be a physical location (such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), London Stock Exchange (LSE), JSE Limited (JSE), Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) or an electronic system such as NASDAQ. Much trading of stocks takes place on an exchange; still, corporate actions (merger, spinoff) are outside an exchange, while any two companies or people, for whatever reason, may agree to sell the stock from the one to the other without using an exchange. Trading of currencies and bonds is largely on a bilateral basis, although some bonds trade o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Active Risk
In finance, tracking error or active risk is a measure of the risk in an investment portfolio that is due to active management decisions made by the portfolio manager; it indicates how closely a portfolio follows the index to which it is benchmarked. The best measure is the standard deviation of the difference between the portfolio and index returns. Many portfolios are managed to a benchmark, typically an index. Some portfolios are expected to replicate, before trading and other costs, the returns of an index exactly (e.g., an index fund), while others are expected to ' actively manage' the portfolio by deviating slightly from the index in order to generate active returns. Tracking error is a measure of the deviation from the benchmark; the aforementioned index fund would have a tracking error close to zero, while an actively managed portfolio would normally have a higher tracking error. Thus the tracking error does not include any risk (return) that is merely a function of the mark ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Active Management
Active management (also called ''active investing'') is an approach to investing. In an actively managed portfolio of investments, the investor selects the investments that make up the portfolio. Active management is often compared to passive management or index investing. The average actively managed mutual fund in the US underperforms the average passive mutual fund. As a consequence, mainstream economic advice is to invest in passive mutual funds. Approach Active investors aim to generate additional returns by buying and selling investments advantageously. They look for investments where the market price differs from the underlying value and will buy investments when the market price is too low and sell investments when the market price is too high. Active investors use various techniques to identify mispriced investments. Two common techniques are: * Fundamental analysis. This approach analyzes the characteristics of individual investments to evaluate their risk and po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Investment Style
Investment style refers to different style characteristics of equities, bonds or financial derivatives within a given investment philosophy. Theory would favor a combination of big capitalization, passive and value. Of course one could almost get that when investing in an important Index like S&P 500, EURO STOXX or the like. Also the degree of financial leverage and diversification are also factors Investor traits The style is determined by * the temper and the beliefs of the investor. * some personal or social traits (investor profile) such as age, gender, income, wealth, family, tax situation... * generally, its financial return / risk objectives, assuming they are precisely set and fully rational. Some styles Active vs. Passive Active investors believe in their ability to outperform the overall market by picking stocks they believe may perform well. Passive investors, on the other hand, feel that simply investing in a market index fund may produce potentially higher l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asset Allocation
Asset allocation is the implementation of an investment strategy that attempts to balance risk versus reward by adjusting the percentage of each asset in an investment portfolio according to the investor's risk tolerance, goals and investment time frame. The focus is on the characteristics of the overall portfolio. Such a strategy contrasts with an approach that focuses on individual assets. Description Many financial experts argue that asset allocation is an important factor in determining returns for an investment portfolio. Asset allocation is based on the principle that different assets perform differently in different market and economic conditions. A fundamental justification for asset allocation is the notion that different asset classes offer returns that are not perfectly correlated, hence diversification reduces the overall risk in terms of the variability of returns for a given level of expected return. Asset diversification has been described as "the only free lunch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Portfolio (finance)
In finance, a portfolio is a collection of investments. Definition The term “portfolio” refers to any combination of financial assets such as stocks, bonds and cash. Portfolios may be held by individual investors or managed by financial professionals, hedge funds, banks and other financial institutions. It is a generally accepted principle that a portfolio is designed according to the investor's risk tolerance, time frame and investment objectives. The monetary value of each asset may influence the risk/reward ratio of the portfolio. When determining asset allocation, the aim is to maximise the expected return and minimise the risk. This is an example of a multi-objective optimization problem: many efficient solutions are available and the preferred solution must be selected by considering a tradeoff between risk and return. In particular, a portfolio A is dominated by another portfolio A' if A' has a greater expected gain and a lesser risk than A. If no portfolio dominate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Returns-based Style Analysis
Returns-based style analysis is a statistical technique used in finance to deconstruct the returns of investment strategies using a variety of explanatory variables. The model results in a strategy's exposures to asset classes or other factors, interpreted as a measure of a fund or portfolio manager's style. While the model is most frequently used to show an equity mutual fund’s style with reference to common style axes (such as large/small and value/growth), recent applications have extended the model’s utility to model more complex strategies, such as those employed by hedge funds. Returns based strategies that use factors such as momentum signals (e.g., 52-week high) have been popular to the extent that industry analysts incorporate their use in their Buy/Sell recommendations. History William F. Sharpe first presented the model in his 1988 article "Determining a Fund’s Effective Asset Mix". Under the name RBSA, this model was made available in commercial software soon aft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Performance Attribution
Performance attribution, or investment performance attribution is a set of techniques that performance analysts use to explain why a portfolio's performance differed from the benchmark. This difference between the portfolio return and the benchmark return is known as the active return. The active return is the component of a portfolio's performance that arises from the fact that the portfolio is actively managed. Different kinds of performance attribution provide different ways of explaining the active return. Attribution analysis attempts to distinguish which of the two factors of portfolio performance, ''superior stock selection'' or ''superior market timing'', is the source of the portfolio's overall performance. Specifically, this method compares the total return of the manager's actual investment holdings with the return for a predetermined benchmark portfolio and decomposes the difference into a ''selection effect'' and an ''allocation effect''. Simple example Consider a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Calendar Effect
A calendar effect (or calendar anomaly) is any market anomaly, different behaviour of stock markets, or economic effect which appears to be related to the calendar, such as the day of the week, time of the month, time of the year, time within the U.S. presidential cycle, decade within the century, etc... Some people believe that if they do exist, it is possible to use market timing. Seasonal patterns are not confined to prices; many other systems can exhibit the same kind of calendar effect. However, the term is most often used in an economic context. Causes Market prices are often subject to seasonal tendencies because the availability and demand for an item is not constant throughout the year. For example, natural gas prices often rise in the winter because that commodity is in demand as a heating fuel. In the summer, when the demand for heat is lower, prices typically fall. Examples Notable calendar effects include: * Sell in May principle (or Halloween indicator) * Januar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Index Fund
An index fund (also index tracker) is a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) designed to follow certain preset rules so that the fund can a specified basket of underlying investments.Reasonable Investor(s), Boston University Law Review, available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2579510 While index providers often emphasize that they are for-profit organizations, index providers have the ability to act as "reluctant regulators" when determining which companies are suitable for an index. Those rules may include tracking prominent indexes like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average or implementation rules, such as tax-management, tracking error minimization, large block trading or patient/flexible trading strategies that allow for greater tracking error but lower market impact costs. Index funds may also have rules that screen for social and sustainable criteria. An index fund's rules of construction clearly identify the type of companies suitable for the fund. The most c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Technical Analysis
In finance, technical analysis is an analysis methodology for analysing and forecasting the direction of prices through the study of past market data, primarily price and volume. Behavioral economics and quantitative analysis use many of the same tools of technical analysis, which, being an aspect of active management, stands in contradiction to much of modern portfolio theory. The efficacy of both technical and fundamental analysis is disputed by the efficient-market hypothesis, which states that stock market prices are essentially unpredictable, and research on whether technical analysis offers any benefit has produced mixed results. History The principles of technical analysis are derived from hundreds of years of financial market data. Some aspects of technical analysis began to appear in Amsterdam-based merchant Joseph de la Vega's accounts of the Dutch financial markets in the 17th century. In Asia, technical analysis is said to be a method developed by Homma Munehisa duri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
