In this paper I derive a risk-adjusted measure of portfolio performance (now known as "Jensen's Alpha") that estimates how much a manager's forecasting ability contributes to the fund's returns. The measure is based on the theory of the pricing of capital assets by Sharpe (1964), Lintner (1965a) and Treynor (Undated). I apply the measure to estimate the predictive ability of 115 mutual fund managers in the period 1945-1964—that is their ability to earn returns which are higher than those we would expect given the level of risk of each of the portfolios. The foundations of the model and the properties of the performance measure suggested here are discussed in Section II. The evidence on mutual fund performance indicates not only that these 115 mutual funds were on average not able to predict security prices well enough to outperform a buy-the-marketand-hold policy, but also that there is very little evidence that any individual fund was able to do significantly better than that which we expected from mere random chance. It is also important to note that these conclusions hold even when we measure the fund returns gross of management expenses (that is assume their bookkeeping, research, and other expenses except brokerage commissions were obtained free). Thus on average the funds apparently were not quite successful enough in their trading activities to recoup even their brokerage expenses. Keywords: Jensen's Alpha, mutual fund performance, risk-adjusted returns, forecasting ability, predictive ability.

The Solution of a Class of Limited Diversification Portfolio Selection Problems by Gwyneth Owens Butera A branch-and-bound algorithm for the solution of a class of mixed-integer nonlinear programming problems arising from the field of investment portfolio selection is presented. The problems in this class are characterized by the inclusion of the fixed transaction costs associated with each asset, a constraint that explicitly limits the number of distinct assets in the selected portfolio, or both. Modeling either of these forms of limiting the cost of owning an investment portfolio involves the introduction of binary variables, resulting in a mathematical programming problem that has a nonconvex feasible set. Two objective functions are examined in this thesis; the first is a positive definite quadratic function which is commonly used in the selection of investment portfolios. The second is a convex function that is not continuously differentiable; this objective function, although not...