At 12:00 noon, December 9, the ninth session (2021 Fall) of the “Noon Sunshine - Young Scholars Seminar” was held as scheduled in the School of Finance, Nankai University. Huang Haitao, a newly recruited assistant professor in the School of Finance, gave a talk about his recent working paper “Daily Mutual Fund Performance.” Dr. Huang obtained his PhD in Business Administration from Robinson School of Business at Georgia State University. His current research areas are financial econometrics, empirical asset pricing and mutual funds. Ding Jing, an assistant professor in the School of Economics and Management at Harbin Institute of Technology, was invited as the discussant. Dr. Ding holds a PhD in Finance from Tsinghua University and is a former visiting scholar at the University of Toronto and Washington University in St. Louis. Han Xu, Party Secretary of the School of Finance, and Liu Lanbiao, Associate Dean of the School of Finance, attended the event.

As an academic exchange event among faculty and students, this forum has received great attention and strong support from school leaders. Both faculty and students actively participated and filled the seminar room.

In this seminar, Dr. Huang presented his latest working paper “Daily Mutual Fund Performance.” At the beginning, he explained the motivation for using daily returns to evaluate mutual fund performance from the perspectives of economics and econometrics. Then, starting from some unique properties of daily returns data, he introduced an econometric framework that uses daily returns to select skilled funds. Finally, he showed in detail the empirical results from this new framework. Different from traditional methods that rely on monthly returns, he found that the new methodology identifies skilled funds with excellent stock selection ability no matter in long or short terms that have high Sharpe ratios and risk-adjusted returns. The persistence of stock-selection ability of skilled funds exists from the quarterly to yearly horizon, but this persistence cannot be found using monthly data.

After the presentation, Dr. Ding made several comments on the paper. She suggested that the paper can be improved in terms of proving that the method is more accurate than existing methods and showing the economic significance of the methodological improvement. Dr. Ding commented that she highly evaluated this paper.

During the seminar, the audience asked questions from time to time, and Dr. Huang answered each question in detail. The entire forum was immersed in a strong academic atmosphere.

 “Noon Sunshine” is a regular academic exchange event organized by the School of Finance, Nankai University. “Noon Sunshine” provides a valuable platform for fostering communication and collaboration between experts and scholars, between faculty and students, and between Nankai Finance and domestic and international academic communities. The event seeks to inspire ideas, broaden horizons, stimulate academic research and promote potential research cooperation.