Returns on Open-Ended Polish Investment Funds in the Aspect of Fund Characteristics

Abstract

Theoretical background: Capital allocation on the stock market is associated with having extensive knowledge and skills. This can be done individually or through investment funds. There are many funds on the markets whose investment strategies do not differ from each other. Therefore, choosing entities from among them for the investment portfolio is not easy. Around the world, especially on developed markets, a lot of research has been conducted to identify the characteristics of funds that generate above-average returns. However, Polish literature on the subject lacks analyses that refer to the topic of the relationship between specific fund characteristics and the rates of return they achieve. This article aims to fill this gap.

Purpose of the article: An attempt to identify specific characteristics of investment funds that generated the highest and lowest rates of return on the market. The article verifies the hypothesis that investment funds return rates differ significantly depending on the characteristics of individual funds.

Research methods: For the purposes of the article, the rates of return of open-ended investment funds of the universal type were analyzed, categorized according to age, net asset value and level of costs of fund operations. The time range of the research was 2009–2018. Deductive inference and statistical methods were used to achieve the article’s goal and the hypothesis verifiation. The significance of differences between rates of return for individual groups of funds was analyzed on the basis of the Student’s t-Test.

Main findings: The conducted analyses showed that in the researched period the highest rates of return were obtained by funds: 1) which were active on the market from 10 to 15 years (65.03% total rate of return); 2) whose value of assets ranged from PLN 50 million to PLN 100 million (63.67%); 3) whose operating costs relative to assets ranged from 3% to 4% (63.75%). Whereas the groups of funds that obtained the lowest rates of return were the following funds: 1) operating on the market from 5 to 10 years (33.47%); 2) with an asset value of less than PLN 10 million (-21.79%); 3) whose operating costs relative to assets were above 6% (16.69%). It should be emphasized, however, that the differences between rates of return of individual groups of funds were not statistically significant. For this reason, the research hypothesis put forward has been verified negatively.