Sky Blog
The mutual fund industry has become increasingly concentrated. The five largest fund families managed about 35% of industry assets in 2005, compared with 57% in 2024. One explanation is economic efficiency: Successful managers attract more capital, and larger organizations benefit …
Mutual fund disclosures read, unsurprisingly, like the legal documents they are—full of terms of art, legalese, and stock language about performance, fees, and investment risk. It is tempting to dismiss disclosures as “boilerplate”—a four-letter word in the law, belittling the …
America’s capital markets are the envy of the world but face an existential threat from the meteoric rise of index funds. The problem is a growing erosion of corporate accountability. Last month, President Trump took a first pass at this …
The backlash against environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) investing has been swift and fierce. More than 20 U.S. states have passed laws or taken administrative action targeting ESG considerations in asset management. Flows into ESG funds have slowed, and for …
Institutional investors such as mutual funds, pension funds, and exchange traded funds (ETFs) play a prominent role in today’s economy. According to the CFA Institute, institutional investors now hold over $70 trillion in investable assets and thus wield immense influence …
The right of shareholders to vote is essential for maximizing the value of their shares and good corporate governance. However, in a diffusely held corporation, few shareholders have the incentive to monitor management at their own cost, leading to a …
Jack Bogle, the father of
The retirement security of millions of American workers is increasingly tied to an investment vehicle that most have never heard of, and whose dramatic growth over the last 40 years has received almost no regulatory or academic scrutiny.
With nearly …
Robo-voting occurs when an investment fund mechanically follows the voting recommendations of its proxy adviser in corporate elections. The practice has become easier for funds with the development of online voting platforms that a proxy adviser can complete in advance …
Actively managed mutual funds invest with the goal of outperforming a benchmark index or achieving an investment objective. Many academic studies focus on whether mutual funds outperform benchmark returns and debate whether abnormal returns can be attributed to skill or …
Sign up for an investment account, and you will likely be presented with a dizzying range of investment products. The industry caters to investors with different risk appetites, savings pots, time horizons, ESG outlooks, religious commitments, and more. In some …
Substantively, banks are pooled investment funds, like mutual funds, exchange traded funds, and so on: They take people’s money and use it to buy financial assets. There is one crucial difference, however. In those other funds, losses are immediately passed …
As institutional investors grow in size and influence, questions arise as to whether they are effective stewards for equity investors. That the three mutual fund families with the most total net assets each holds equity positions in around 5,000 U.S. …
Investors allocate capital to mutual funds based on past performance and the perception of whether a fund can “beat the market.” In fact, mutual fund companies explicitly promote their funds based on these factors, knowing that investors will respond. The …
In the last few years, there has been a dramatic increase in shareholder engagement on environmental and social issues. Consider two examples from 2021. Eighty-one percent of DuPont shareholders approved a proposal requiring the company to disclose how much plastic …
Good afternoon. Thank you, Paulita and Rajib, for your gracious invitation and kind welcome to this year’s program on current issues and trends in Investment Management.[1] As I suspect many of you know – and as the spring regulatory …
The ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have increased market volatility and even caused markets to close in some countries. These fluctuations substantially affected mutual funds, leading to fire sales of their assets and SEC scrutiny of their risk management. …
Millions of investors rely on the disclosures of U.S. registered mutual funds in making their investment decisions, but some of the most influential industry opinion leaders and legal scholars have criticized the quality of those disclosures. Like public companies, mutual …
Back to normal doesn’t mean what it used to. Following a year like no other, demand came roaring out the gate in 2021. While the pace of new demand has slowed somewhat in recent months amidst concern of new COVID
It is well-documented that relatively few women manage investment funds. In 2019, for example, women accounted for 37.5 percent of all lawyers, 49 percent of judges, 34.5 percent of economists, 19 percent of surgeons, and 26 percent of chief executives, …