MPI Research Corner

Investors with Vontobel Asset Management’s Rajiv Jain, Morningstar’s 2012 International-Stock Fund Manager of the Year, have a lot to be happy about. His 40 Act funds under the Virtus label performed very well in 2012 – to say nothing of their longer-term performance – and his Virtus Foreign Opportunities Fund (JVIAX) outperformed the MSCI All [...]

What are they? In 2010, Russell launched the Russell Stability Indexes. We believe that the index series is very useful for investment practitioners and fund analysts looking to better understand exposures and risk factors – particularly those associated with sensitivity to economic cycles and price of stocks – exhibited by funds and portfolios. The Russell [...]

To say that the post-Financial Crisis, Fed-fueled investing climate is one of markedly high correlations has become platitudinous. Managers of U.S. equity mutual funds know this all too well; the ability of the S&P 500 to explain their returns has risen to very high historical levels, with the average large blend fund exhibiting an R2 [...]

Can a fund whose alpha is positive significantly underperform the market? Yes, it can. This is a common question we receive during our clients’ Quarterly reporting, so we felt it worth addressing this phenomena – and taking a quick look at funds that gain this distinction. There is a common misperception that alpha means outperformance [...]

North America Equity USD denominated funds’ performances range from -54.91% to 13.04% over the last 52 weeks (ending December 2, 2011), in USD terms. On average, the best 5% of the funds outperform the market (pegged to the S&P 500 Index) by approximately 5.13% and the worst 5% underperform by approximately 15.73%. We last analyzed [...]