Track: Financial Engineering

Abstract

Investigating a comment by John C. Bogle that the changes in the mutual fund industry have benefitted the asset managers not the investors, this article adds a new dimension to his notion. For countries like Bangladesh, where only 1% market capitalization of mutual fund and one-third of mutual funds are government controlled, investors have only the prices to get insights into the underlying assets of mutual funds. So whether prices can really reflect the underlying performance of mutual funds comes as a valid question. In this article, we have studied the closing price and security wise investment of a representative sample of government-controlled mutual funds for last seven years. Then we have considered a panel of the returns with closing price and time dimension. Using pooled OLS estimator, we have estimated the price coefficient against returns and found that changes in prices have little effect on the changes of underlying securities returns. This result violates all the prior analysis on performance indicators based on price returns and gives a concrete proof that while taking investment decision on those mutual funds, investors remain blind sighted. This study inspires to innovate something new for those blind-sighted investors.