Traditional performance evaluation assumes that investment styles and economic states remain constant.
Traditional performance evaluation assumes that investment styles and economic states remain constant. Conditional performance evaluation, however, compares a fund's returns with the returns of a dynamic strategy that matches the fund's time-varying risk exposures. In this Research Foundation monograph, the authors revisit the main empirical results of the conditional performance evaluation literature using a large, updated sample of mutual funds and expand and refine the treatment of conditioning information. Because conditional performance evaluation uses more information than traditional methods, it has the potential to provide more accurate performance measures—an attractive feature for anyone trying to assess whether a fund's performance arises from manager skill or from chance.