Starting on the Wrong Foot: Seasonality in Mutual Fund Performance

We document a marked seasonal pattern in the aggregate underperformance of active mutual funds. On average, a value-weighted portfolio of active funds underperforms the market and other benchmark portfolios in the first month of a quarter only. This intra-quarter pattern remains significant across fund size and investment style categories. It is partially consistent with tournament-like behavior (quarter-end NAV inflation and window dressing) by mutual funds, but bears limited to no relation with systematic time variation in microstructure biases, investors’ flows or cash distributions. Our results pose a challenge to existing explanations of the mutual funds’ underperformance puzzle.