Episode 8: Tim Riley on the Value of Active Management

“. . . our biggest focus was that just be able to see the same two or three studies cited again and again and again in support of this belief that active management was not creating value. And we just wanted to look and say, "All right, but we have all these other papers, and let's just take it to some more aggregate viewpoint." And if you take all 300 papers together, considering the quality of each, what conclusion would you come to?

Then what we found was that, you know, not that active management's great or active management's bad, just that there was clearly a lot more nuance to it than it's often portrayed in, you know, "The Wall Street Journal" or a lot of publications you see.”

Tim Riley, top researcher in the Economics Department at the Sam M. Walton School of Business has done a comprehensive review of the academic literature regarding the value that active management of equity portfolios adds to investor returns, to either validate or dispel the notion that passive portfolios perform just as well and the value is more in the relationship than the growth of the investments. Find out what his research revealed, and how to show clients the value you can add through actively managed funds and ETFs, in this exciting and revealing episode.  - Tim Riley, Assistant Professor, University of Arkansas, Sam M. Walton School of Business

Tim Riley is an expert and researcher in financial market analysis, specializing in performance assessments and risk assessments, studying mutual funds and the effects of active management as an assistant professor at the Sam M. Walton School of Business in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Tim completed his Ph.D. in finance at the University in Kentucky in 2014. After graduation, he spent two years as a financial economist at the U.S. SEC., where he worked on mutual fund liquidity regulation. His research is focused on mutual funds, hedge funds and other managed portfolios, and his work has been published in the "Journal of Financial Economics," "Financial Management," "Critical Finance Review," "Financial Analysts Journal," and "Journal of Empirical Finance," and of course "The Wall Street Journal," "CBS News," and Morningstar. In 2018, Tim became a CFA charter holder.