Our main empirical ndings are as follows. We nd that a range of nancial and macroeconomic variables prove helpful in selecting funds that are capable of generating future alphas. In particular, we nd evidence that a number of investment strategies (that use macroeconomic variables to predict fund returns) generate out-of-sample alphas from 7-9%/year (after fund-level trading costs and fees), when measured with a single-factor model, and from 12-13%/year with a four-factor model that controls for fund exposures to size, book-to-market, and momentum. .
