Högskolan i Skövde

Mutual funds are the common name for the open-end investment companies. This is the dominant investment company today, accounting for roughly 90% of investment comply assets. Assets under management in the mutual fund industry in United States surpassed $ 12.068 trillion by the end of April 2008 .

Mutual funds performance is one of the most frequently studied topics in investment area in most countries. The reason for this popularity is availability of data and the importance of mutual funds as vehicles for investment in stock market for both individual and institutions. Since mutual funds have become popular the research has also started to include the ways of finding the right mutual funds. Although the price shares and the income from them may go down as well as up but choosing the right mutual funds can have considerable effects on investors ending wealth. The thesis examines the past performance of mutual funds as a criterion for investors' future choices. In particular, it examines if mutual funds which invested in the Swedish stock market. Swedish funds assets have passed the trillion kronor mark in March 2005, and it is rapidly increasing. We started our analysis by the funds attributes influenced the returns. In our study hypotheses are the fund characteristics i.e. popularity growth cost and management variables are included. These attributes are most frequently used by finance academies to simple and multiple regression analysis is used to test these hypotheses. We do not find any strong evidence that the past performance is a guide to future performance. As most of the results studies, our results may be subject to survivorship bias, because we have included only 33 funds in our sample during the last eight years 2000-2007.

Mostly data is collected from Morningstar Sweden, the Swedish Investment fund association and secondary data from some of the mutual funds annual reports .We analyze the data for last eight years from 2000-01-01 to 2007-12-31 and the funds which are invested mostly in Swedish securities.

Before and during our thesis different research studies and financial articles were studied relevant to our research thesis. Our research study results shows that the attributes which have some impact on mutual funds returns are risk, fund size, age, fund turnover and management tenure. The results indicate that the hypothesized relationship between mutual funds performance and the explanatory variables are generally upheld. The study provides a comprehensive examination of recent Swedish mutual funds performance by analyzing the funds returns and funds attributes affecting the funds performance and an effort to link performance to funds specific characteristics.