We examine the information content of South African (SA) equity unit trusts to investigate whether risk is heterogeneous between investment objective groups and homogeneous within groups because those characteristics are vital to proper investment decision making. We find risk differences within SA equity groups especially in the Equity-General and Equity-Growth. However, in the other categories, the systematic risk differences depended on the choice of benchmark. Those risk differences may have significant implications for investors. Examination of between-group risk revealed that not all the equity categories were heterogeneous. We also find that the choice of benchmark is critical when measuring and comparing performance characteristics of funds.

We analyzed the South African general equity unit trusts for the period 30 June 2002 to 31 December 2014 to assess if we can re-categorize them into risk homogeneity groups. The current ASISA standards do not fully classify the unit trusts into categories that have within-group homogeneity and between-group heterogeneity.By analyzing the persistence of both systematic and total risk we concluded that we could objectively classify these unit trusts into objective risk homogeneity groups and improve on the current ASISA-mandate-based classification.