An examination of Australian equity trusts for selectivity and market timing performance

The principal issue examined in this paper is the market timing ability of a segment of the Australian investment fund industry, namely, equity trusts, over the period 1988-1997. The approach followed involves running both quadratic excess returns market model and dual-beta excess returns market model regressions. In addition, some specification tests are applied. The results suggest that for our sample over the period examined, there is little evidence of market timing ability. Further, there is no clear dominance of one market timing model over the other. We do find however, that a cubic market model specification does fit the data quite well for nearly one third of our sample.