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Bridge over ocean
1 May 2001 Financial Analysts Journal Volume 57, Issue 3

Valuing Active Managers, Fees, and Fund Discounts

  1. Robert Ferguson
  2. Dean Leistikow

We use risk-neutral valuation to value a portfolio and decompose the value into the components accruing to its stakeholders—service providers, portfolio managers, and the owners. The analysis incorporates managers' expected performance and contract-renewal issues. It provides a paradigm for valuing active portfolio management. A managed portfolio's economic value is shown to differ from its net asset value. The article provides an improved foundation for computing fair closed-end fund discounts and a partial explanation of equilibrium in the markets for open- and closed-end mutual funds. The article implies that changes in closed-end fund discounts are the analog of open-end fund inflows. It also shows that closed-end fund discounts are relatively sensitive to small changes in anticipated fund performance.

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