Jack Bogle, the father of
mutual funds
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Overtaking Mutual Funds: The Hidden Rise and Risk of Collective Investment Trusts
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 …
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Should We Worry About Robo-Voting?
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 …
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Are Actively Managed Mutual Funds Betting on the CEO?
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 …
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How to Restore Shareholder Agency With Pass-Through Voting
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 …
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Why Markets Need More Information to Properly Monitor Banks
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 …
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Do Bonds Affect Equity Monitoring?
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. …
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How Mutual Funds Change Benchmarks to Manipulate Performance
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 …
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The New Corporate Governance
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 …
SEC Director of Investment Management Speaks at PLI
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 …
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Deep Learning Mutual-Fund Risk Assessment and Performance
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. …
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Does SEC Scrutiny Improve Mutual Fund Disclosures?
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 …
ISS Discusses Increase in Fund Flows for 2021
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Do Investors Pay Less Attention to Women Fund Managers?
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, …
Sullivan & Cromwell Discusses SEC Proposal to Enhance Proxy Voting Disclosure by Investment Funds
On September 29, 2021, the SEC issued a proposed rulemaking to enhance the information mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and other registered management investment companies (“funds”) report annually about their proxy votes. The proposal also would require so-called “institutional investment managers” …
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Common Ownership: Solutions in Search of a Problem
Mutual funds and exchange-traded funds are the cornerstone of many Americans’ investment and retirement plans. (For simplicity, we refer to all these investments as “mutual funds.”) Collectively, investment companies such as BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, and Vanguard hold more than …
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Moving Beyond Mutual Funds
As has become widely known in the past few years, the mutual-fund industry is more concentrated than ever, especially because of the growing use of index funds. Whether this is a problem and how to respond have been the topics …
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Hiding in Plain Sight: The Global Implications of Manager Disclosure
Delegated asset management, and mutual funds in particular, have become the investment vehicle of choice for retail investors in capital markets worldwide. At the end of 2020, open-end mutual funds had a total of $63 trillion in assets under management …
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“Public” Mutual Funds
The Big 3 mutual-fund managers (BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard) have amassed incredibly large public-company holdings through the array of mutual funds they oversee. As a result, they now play a pivotal role in corporate governance in many of the …
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Passive Exit
Economist Albert O. Hirschman (1970) classically set out the two alternatives facing dissatisfied members of an organization: They can voice displeasure or exit for greener pastures. Hirschman’s model has long explained the tradeoff facing shareholders of a poorly governed firm: …