Making a Difference: European Mutual Funds Distinctiveness and Peers’ Performance

Skilled managers of equity mutual funds can develop innovative strategies to outsmart their style peers. We unveil various causes of distinct investment strategies and test whether they enable to outperform peer competitors. We frame our paper in the context of European funds and propose a novel procedure for measuring and testing the impact of strategy distinctiveness that deals with endogenous style classification and sample noise in the comparison of peer performance. We find a strong, robust, and positive impact of strategy distinctiveness on financial performance. Yet, the marginal effect decreases with the level of distinctiveness.