Ph.D. Anders Ekholm has received the American Association of Individual Investors Best Paper Award for a research paper that he will present at the Southwestern Finance Association 2010 Annual Meeting in Dallas, USA, in March. The Conference programme committee chose the winning paper titled "Residual Return Analysis: A New Method for Detecting Portfolio Manager Activity" among the research papers that had been accepted for presentation at the annual meeting.

Ekholm's paper discusses a new method for evaluating investment funds and their managers. His residual return analysis explains the causes behind the fund return. By residual return Ekholm means the difference between the return of a portfolio and the stock exchange index return.

The activity level and the types of activities conducted by a portfolio manager can be discovered by analyzing the residual returns. In practice this is beneficial for investors who as a result now can better than previously evaluate how portfolio manager live up to investment strategy.

Adjunct Professor Anders Ekholm is a teaching assistant in finance at Hanken and Chief Investment Officer at the banking firm Eufex Ltd.