This paper examines the selectivity and market timing abilities of Islamic fund managers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), since the empirical research has yet to explore the profitability and investment risk factors involved. We use a uniquely large set of data for 134 Islamic funds for a period from June 2002 to December 2019, and this was free from any survival bias. We found that Islamic fund managers in the KSA demonstrated good selectivity skills but no market timing ability. We also found that Islamic fund managers in the KSA tend to select companies with aggressive investment patterns despite their low profitability.

The growing interest in mutual funds in Ghana has been tremendous over the last decade as evidenced by the continuous increases in number and total funds under management. However, no empirical work has been done on the selectivity and timing ability of the mutual fund managers. Using monthly returns data hand-collected from the reports of the mutual fund managers for the period January 2007-December 2012, this paper examines the market timing and selectivity ability of mutual fund managers in Ghana using the classic Treynor-Mazuy (1966) model and Henriksson- Merton (1981) model. The results suggest that, in general mutual fund managers in Ghana are not able to effectively select stocks and also are not able to predict both the magnitude and direction of future market returns. More specifically, all of the sample mutual fund managers attain significant negative selectivity coefficients and also most of them attain insignificant negative timing coefficients.