Mutual Fund Performance : Active- and Passive Fund Management

Sammanfattning: In this thesis I will examine active equity mutual fund managers’ ability to outperform an index, which is done by utilizing a sample of four equity mutual funds that mainly invest in large Swedish quoted companies. In order to measure the risk-adjusted performance of the funds, a model created by Michael Jensen will be used. Furthermore, I will investigate whether the managers of the mutual funds increase/decrease the risk level, or rather the beta, when the stock market is bullish/bearish. Hence, two time spans have been chosen, 2001-2003 and 2004-2006, where the previous represents a bearish stock market and the later represents a bullish stock market. The empirical evidence indicates that one fund in each period was significantly outper-formed by the comparable index. Furthermore, the result also suggests that two significant funds were talking more risk than the index in the bearish time period while three signifi-cant funds decreased the risk level during the bullish time period.