Conditional benchmarks and predictors of mutual fund performance

Recent studies link mutual fund performance to measures of active management, and this evidence often takes the form of large spreads in unconditional alphas for characteristic-sorted portfolios. Unconditional benchmarks can, however, produce misleading inferences on managerial skill for strategies that exhibit substantial turnover and unstable factor exposures. We propose a performance attribution model that accounts for predictable changes in portfolio style. Compared to existing methods, our benchmarks yield superior tracking performance and a more powerful statistical assessment of abnormal returns. We re-evaluate six active management proxies using our method and conclude that these measures are largely unrelated to managerial ability.