Active role of Finnish allocation fund managers : is your manager eating your savings?

Abstract

Many literatures conducted on mutual fund define its popularity among investors and financial analyst. The literatures can be basically summarized in three groups; Test of fund manager’s skills and stock selection, Analysis of fund characteristic and its performance, and lastly on the persistence of fund performance. From the balanced mutual fund data domiciled in Finland, this thesis study the role of active allocation fund manager of Finland and find if they can add extra value to their investors. With the unique sample data and benchmark market employing regression and non-regression methodology; this thesis analyzes the emerging market of developed country.

This thesis examines 15 balanced mutual funds of Finland through various existing models such as single and multifactor models, market timing model, Sharpe ratio and information ratio to provide empirical findings on performance and active role of Finnish fund managers. The findings were in line with various prior literatures on mutual fund showing that balanced fund managers do not add extra value to the fund. Most of the risk adjusted abnormal returns are equal to zero or negative. Further, more than half of the sample fund managers possess insufficient skills in adding extra return for risk taken. The excellent Rsquare value we got in every applied models, suggest a good working of model and have impact in explanatory power in the analysis. Lastly, Finnish balanced mutual fund investors get better return by changing their strategy of investment to available options within the company.