The Effect of Active Management on Mutual Fund Performance in Tehran Stock Exchange Market

Mutual funds, by having a net asset value near to 102,771 thousands billiard Rial by the end of 2019 plays an important role in Iran's capital market. One of the factors affecting performance of these funds is the activity level of its portfolio compare to index. The fund managers, despite the mutual funds expenses, have been always questioned if they had been able to outscore the market or not? In this research, the impacts of active management, expenses ratio, turnover ratio, size, fund flow ratio and individual investor share ratio on mutual fund performance are studied.

By using Fama – French five factors model and mutual funds monthly return, the value of alpha and R-Squared (R2) indicating the performance and passiveness of fund respectively, will be calculated. R2 value is always between zero and one. When R2 is close to one, it is indicating that fund’s performance is like market index and the portfolio is managed passively or the fund’s portfolio is a closet indexer. In other hand, when the value of R2 is near to zero, it shows that the fund’s portfolio is managed actively. Thus, the active management is proportional to (1 - R2) value. Finally by utilizing regression equation, the impact of mutual fund’s active management, expenses ratio, turnover ratio, size, fund flow ratio and individual investor share ratio on fund performance is investigated.

According to the results, there is a significant inverse relation between active management and mutual fund performance. Funds with larger size and higher expense ratio show improvement in performance, and increment of fund’s flow reduces its performance. In funds with weak performance, there is a reverse relation between turnover ratio and performance. Also, there is a significant direct relation between individual investor share and fund’s performance.

Active management did not result in performance improvement in Tehran Stock Exchange Market.