Альфа немецкого паевого фонда. Надежный или сомнительный финансовый показатель

This paper analyses the relationship of benchmark picking behaviour of fund managers regarding German domiciled equity mutual funds and the corresponding alpha. Previous studies have shown that average mutual funds underperform the market and do not generate positive risk-adjusted returns (Reuter & Guercio, 2011). However, the benchmark picking behaviour of managers can significantly impact the risk-adjusted return and therefore explain better performance than actually achieved with a different benchmark. Studies from the Norwegian mutual funds alpha have shown that strategic benchmark picking behaviour of managers lead to an alpha with higher risk-adjusted returns (Bukhvalova, 2017). Conversely, this paper comes to the conclusion that equity funds domiciled in Germany have on average 0.7886% higher best-fit-alpha performance than fund manager selected alpha. Therefore, this paper concludes that fund managers in Germany do not choose benchmarks in order to expose better alpha performance.

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………..1
1.1 Funds ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………2
1.2 Benchmark……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….3
1.3 Important Fund Types ………………………………………………………………………………………………..4
1.3.1 Mutual Funds…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4 1.3.2 ETF (Exchange Traded Funds)………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 5 1.3.3 Hedge Funds ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 5
1.4 CAPM………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………6 1.5 Alpha ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………7 1.6 R-Squared ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..7
2. Literature Review…………………………………………………………………………………………………9
3. Methods and Data Description……………………………………………………………………………..17
3.1 Data………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………17
3.1.1 Equity Funds and Benchmarks …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 17 3.1.2 Risk-Free Rate ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 18
3.2 Methodology ………………………………………………………………………………………………………….19
3.2.1 Best-fit-alpha …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 19 3.2.2 Managers alpha ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 19 3.2.3 Approach ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 19
4. Results and Analysis……………………………………………………………………………………………22
4.1 Benchmark……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..22 4.2 Equity funds alpha……………………………………………………………………………………………………23
4.2.1 Results long-term …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 23
4.3 Validity ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….25
4.3.1 Internal Validity ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 25 4.3.2 External Validity……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 25 4.3.3 Measurement ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 26
4.4 Reliability……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….26
5. Discussion and Suggestions for further studies ………………………………………………………..28
5.1 Managerial Implications ……………………………………………………………………………………………30
6. Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………………………..31
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 32 Appendix …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 35 Declaration of Authorship……………………………………………………………………………………….48