False discoveries in the performance of Australian managed funds

•We examine the performance of Australian managed funds adopting FDR.•The use of conditioning information worsens the performance of Australian funds.•Australian managed funds do not exhibit performance persistence.

This paper examines the performance of Australian managed funds by adopting the false discovery rate (FDR). Comparing the estimation results between the four-factor model and the conditional model reveals that the use of conditioning information improves the performance of Australian managed funds, shifting the distribution of alphas to the right. This result is robust to the adoption of the residual-only bootstrap procedure. In addition, when we adopt the conditional model to examine performance persistence by controlling the FDR, we find that Australian managed funds do not exhibit performance persistence.