Classifying Spanish mutual funds according to their survival capacity using SOM

The main purpose of this article is to analyze the survival capacity of mutual funds based on their characteristics. The methodology used to meet this objective is Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), a type of Artificial Neural Network that allows patterns to be grouped together according to their similarity, enabling us to classify mutual funds into surviving funds and disappeared funds. We consider the following variables: age, size, investment flows, performance, volatility, and Morningstar rating. We use a sample of 1,617 Spanish mutual funds, of which 943 had disappeared between 2004 and 2016. The results obtained indicate that SOM accurately classifies 80% of mutual funds. Therefore, SOMs are effective instruments for classifying the disappearance of Spanish mutual funds and the variables used to define them can explain their survival capacity.