Luck Versus Skill: Can Chinese Funds Beat the Market?

Abstract

In this article, we examine luck versus skill in Chinese mutual fund performance. A bootstrap approach has been applied to 773 open-end equity funds over the period 2002–13. Both the analyses with a returns-based measure and a holdings-based measure suggest the same result: no fund in China can outperform the market. We also find that more growth funds have positive alphas, but the result is not statistically significant. For sub-periods, we find that compared with the period 2008–13 there are fewer unskilled managers than during the period 2002–7. The analyses with different bootstrap rules and different minimum data requirements suggest the same result.