Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 1,754

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

FAMA, EUGENE F., FRENCH, KENNETH R.·2010·The Journal of Finance

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.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2010.01598.x

Cites

22 of 22 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

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

Show all 22 references

Cited by

See all 1,754

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.