Over 26% of investment company assets are held in passively managed vehicles. Thus, it is important to understand what affects the performance of passive vehicles and how to choose among the multiple passive options following any index. This paper examines the factors that are important in explaining differences across funds following the same index and demonstrates how to select a passive vehicle that has a high probability of having the best performance in the following years.

A number of articles in financial economics have used quarterly or semi-annual mutual fund holdings data to test hypotheses about investment manager behavior. This article reexamines four well-known hypotheses in finance to determine whether the results of prior tests of these hypotheses remain valid when higher frequency (monthly) holdings data are employed. The areas examined are: momentum trading, tax-motivated trading, window dressing, and tournament behavior. We find that the use of monthly holdings data rather than quarterly holdings data or, in the case of tournament behavior, holdings data rather than monthly return data, change, and in some cases reverse, previous results. This occurs because monthly holdings data capture a large number of trades missed by quarterly data (18.5% of the trades) and permit a more precise estimation of the timing of trades.

An important body of literature in Financial Economics accepts bond ratings as a sufficient metric for determining homogeneous groups of bonds for estimating either risk-neutral probabilities or spot rate curves for valuing corporate bonds. In this paper we examine Moody’s and Standard & Poors ratings of corporate bonds and show they are not sufficient metrics for determining spot rate curves and pricing relationships. We investigate several bond characteristics that have been hypothesized as affecting bond prices and show that from among this set of measures default risk, liquidity, tax liability, recovery rate and bond age leads to better estimates of spot curves and for pricing bonds. This has implications for what factors affect corporate bond prices as well as valuing individual bonds.