Do Actively Managed Mutual Funds Beat Their Benchmarks? An Evaluation of Mutual Fund Performance in Eight Countries

Mutual funds continue to be one of the main investment tools for individual investors around the world. By the end of 2017, the global value of total assets under management by the open-ended mutual funds reached 49.3 trillion US dollars. The literature covered in this research reports the underperformance of active mutual funds compared to their passive benchmarks starting from 1945 until 2007. With using survivor-bias free data, this research evaluates the performances of the actively managed mutual funds across 8 countries for the period 2003-2018. Moreover, this thesis assesses the relationship between mutual fund performances and mutual fund characteristics in 3 of the sample countries. The results show the outperformance of actively managed mutual funds in 7 of the sample countries and a significantly negative relationship between fund size and performance in all 3 of the sample countries.