Virtual Reality? Investment Consultants’ Claims About Their Own Performance
研究利用英国监管机构和非公开数据，发现投资顾问夸大其基金推荐业绩，通过选择基准、回填数据、遗忘亏损产品等手段，且未充分披露方法，导致投资者无法验证。
Investment consultants market their services by claiming their fund manager recommendations add significant value. Using nonpublic data sourced from investment consultants and the UK regulator, we find no such evidence, but identify several practices that explain their exaggerated claims: comparisons to benchmarks instead of peers, inclusion of simulated and backfilled returns, use of investment horizons that allow losers to be forgotten, and unexplained exclusions of products from the analysis. Consultants do not fully disclose their methodology to investors, who therefore cannot verify or reliably compare their performance. This paper was accepted by Haoxiang Zhu, finance. Supplemental Material: Data and the internet appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4218 .