'Hot Hands' in Bond Funds

Abstract:     
We investigate persistence in the relative performance of 3,549 bond mutual funds from 1990 to 2003. We show that bond funds that display strong (weak) performance over a past period continue to do so in future periods. The out-of-sample difference in risk-adjusted return between the top and bottom decile of funds ranked on past alpha exceeds 3.5 percent per year. We demonstrate that a strategy based on past fund returns earns an economically and statistically significant abnormal return, suggesting that bond fund investors can exploit the observed persistence. Our results are robust to a wide range of model specifications and bootstrapped test statistics.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 34

Keywords: bond mutual funds, performance persistence, active management

JEL Classification: G11, G14, G19

working papers series