Individuals who rely on mutual funds to accumulate wealth need advice on how best to select them (Ciccotello&Grant, 1996). The purpose of the study is to gain insight whether fund size and boutique or institutional fund structure of unit trusts affects returns. It expands the body of knowledge on investment performance factors and equips investors with a tool to make informed decisions when contemplating various fund manager offerings.Data was collected from the database of the Association for Savings and Investment (ASISA) for South African general equity unit trust returns and fund size information covering a period of 44 quarters from March 2001 to December 2011. Domestic general equity unit trusts were analysed during the period under review. A regression analysis was run to test for fund size as an indicator of investment performance. A parallel study was conducted to test whether boutique funds outperform institutional funds.The results indicate that fund size has no influence on fund performance. The findings also show that there is no significant difference between the performance of boutique style unit trust funds and institutional unit trust funds. These findings contradict the findings of previous research by (Fama, 1972); (Chen, Hong, Huang, &Kubik, 2004; Ciccotello&Grant, 1996; Droms&Walker, 1996) who found fund size, either positively or negatively have an influence on mutual fund returns while (Gallagher&Martin, 2005) and Schönfeld (2009) concluded that boutique funds offer better returns compared to institutional funds. Investors would be advised to carry out a fund by fund analysis to identify the optimal domestic unit trust investment fund when investing as opposed to an aggregated study. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Understanding what drives stock returns is an essential question for investors, financial institutions, and economists. The question is important not only for individuals, but also for the overall economy, as forms of inefficiency such as bubbles can lead to stock market crashes that have a negative impact on the real economy itself. In contrast to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, which posits that the stock market is efficient at correctly pricing stocks, the accrual anomaly is an example of one of the largest inefficiencies in the equity market. The aim of this thesis is to examine if the accrual anomaly has lessened in recent history. We analyze if the increasing trend of institutional funds trading on accrual mispricing, the increasing presence of cash flow forecasts, or earnings quality could be responsible for mitigating the accrual anomaly effect. A robust MM regression is used to assess the anomaly alleviation. The analysis focuses on the US stock market. We confirm the mitigation of accrual mispricing based on the increase in trading on the accrual anomaly and quality of earnings for the period from 1991 to 2015, but not the growing number of cash flow forecasts.