The DOI matches its Crossref record; 22 of the 22 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Luck versus Skill in the Cross‐Section of Mutual Fund Returns
Abstract
The aggregate portfolio of actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds is close to the market portfolio, but the high costs of active management show up intact as lower returns to investors. Bootstrap simulations suggest that few funds produce benchmark‐adjusted expected returns sufficient to cover their costs. If we add back the costs in fund expense ratios, there is evidence of inferior and superior performance (nonzero true α) in the extreme tails of the cross‐section of mutual fund α estimates.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds
Fama, E. F., & French, K. R. (1993) · Journal of Financial Economics · doi:10.1016/0304-405x(93)90023-5 · Cited by 25,754
Self-citationOn Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance
Carhart, M. M. (1997) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.1997.tb03808.x · Cited by 17,283
The Behavior of Stock-Market Prices
Fama, E. F. (1965) · The Journal of Business · doi:10.1086/294743 · Cited by 8,664
Self-citationTHE PERFORMANCE OF MUTUAL FUNDS IN THE PERIOD 1945–1964
Jensen, M. C. (1968) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.1968.tb00815.x · Cited by 4,329
Mutual Fund Flows and Performance in Rational Markets
Berk, J. B., & Green, R. C. (2004) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/424739 · Cited by 2,083 · cited 12×
“Thus, for percentiles above the 90th, the CAPM t(α) Luck versus Skill in Mutual Fund Returns 1945 Table AI Percentiles of CAPM t(α) Estimates for Actual and Simulated Fund Returns The table shows values of t(α) at selected percentiles (Pct) of the distribution of CAPM t(α) estimates for actual (Act) net and gross fund…”
InfluentialAnother Puzzle: The Growth in Actively Managed Mutual Funds
GRUBER, M. J. (1996) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.1996.tb02707.x · Cited by 2,065
Measuring Fund Strategy and Performance in Changing Economic Conditions
FERSON, W. E., & SCHADT, R. W. (1996) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.1996.tb02690.x · Cited by 1,759
Returns from Investing in Equity Mutual Funds 1971 to 1991
MALKIEL, B. G. (1995) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.1995.tb04795.x · Cited by 1,745
The Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period 1945-1964
Jensen, M. C. (1968) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.2307/2325404 · Cited by 1,707
How Active Is Your Fund Manager? A New Measure That Predicts Performance
Cremers, K. J. M., & Petajisto, A. (2009) · Review of Financial Studies · doi:10.1093/rfs/hhp057 · Cited by 1,654
Cited by
… and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns
Harvey, C. R., Liu, Y., & Zhu, H. (2016) · Review of Financial Studies · doi:10.1093/rfs/hhv059 · Cited by 2,119
Size, value, and momentum in international stock returns
Fama, E. F., & French, K. R. (2012) · Journal of Financial Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jfineco.2012.05.011 · Cited by 1,767
Self-citationMeasuring skill in the mutual fund industry
Berk, J. B., & van Binsbergen, J. H. (2015) · Journal of Financial Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jfineco.2015.05.002 · Cited by 820
The Behavior of Individual Investors
Barber, B. M., & Odean, T. (2013) · Handbook of the Economics of Finance · doi:10.1016/b978-0-44-459406-8.00022-6 · Cited by 750
Scale and skill in active management
Pástor, Ľ., Stambaugh, R. F., & Taylor, L. A. (2015) · Journal of Financial Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jfineco.2014.11.008 · Cited by 547
Metadata
- Authors
- FAMA, E. F., & FRENCH, K. R.
- Venue
- The Journal of Finance
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2010-09-21
- Volume
- 65
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1915-1947
- ISSN
- 0022-1082 (ISSN-L)
- 1540-6261
- OpenAlex
- W2151353604
- Cited by
- 1,754
- References
- 22
- FWCI
- 157.09
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Luck versus Skill in the Cross‐Section of Mutual Fund Returns. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2010.01598.x
- The paper
- FAMA, E. F., & FRENCH, K. R. (2010). Luck versus Skill in the Cross‐Section of Mutual Fund Returns. The Journal of Finance. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2010.01598.x
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.