JCU finance professor looks at performance, tenure of mutual fund managers

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Mutual Funds: A game of chance, rather than skill? Gary Porter, Ph.D., associate professor of finance in John Carroll’s Boler School of Business, is passionate about how people choose to invest their savings, especially when it comes to mutual funds. While mutual fund companies tout ‘experience’ as a prime qualification to help manage their client’s money, Dr. Porter’s research finds that ‘random luck’ may be the secret to their success. He and Bryant University finance professor Jack Trifts, Ph.D., discovered that even the most successful mutual fund managers had their greatest performance during the first three years of their careers. Their winning trends declined with more experience. Their findings, based on 80 years of data, appear in the latest issue of Journal of Applied Finance (vol. 22, no. 1) in a paper titled “The Best Mutual Fund Managers: Testing the Impact of Experience Using a Survivorship-bias Free Dataset.” John Carroll students and faculty can access the paper through the campus library website. Media inquiries regarding the study should be directed to Tonya Strong-Charles at 216.397.1958.

JCU finance professor looks at performance, tenure of mutual fund managers

June 18, 2012