JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Mutual funds have developed tremendously since 1990s that has drawn attention and required deep study. Their explosive growth are encouraged from the globalization and accelerated from the integration of many financial markets around the world. Following the popular trend, the thesis focuses on assessing the performance of mutual funds. The uniqueness of this study is that we have merged the characteristics of developed market and emerging market by adopting the Asian equity mutual funds marketed in Finland into the sample data. With different measures such as Carhart four-factor, market timing, conditional models and information ratio analysis, 20 mutual funds’ performances were analyzed and evaluated over the period of January 2000–December 2013. Using all the methodologies mentioned, the mutual funds chosen underperformed the benchmark selected and the managers are incapable of timing the market, which proves the previous studies’ results of many researchers. Our findings from conditional models confirms the conclusion of Ferson and Schadt (1996) that the conditional version did better in explaining the cross-sectional variation in returns and risks. The adjusted R squared of the models increased remarkably and alphas became more positive; however, the empirical result still delivered that the Asian funds marketed in Finland did not create value for investors.