Concomitant with the development of the mutual fund industry over the last five decades is the evolution of a rich academic literature that addresses a wide variety of mutual fund issues. The purpose of this article is to review the more widely cited studies in the areas of mutual fund performance, market timing, and persistence, and to offer some guidance in these areas for potential future research. In the area of mutual fund performance, more recent findings differ little from earlier results in that they too find that fund managers are generally incapable of outperforming the market. Similarly, the papers on market timing indicate that fund managers, by and large, are unable to time market movements. In the area of persistence, a variety of studies have modified tests based on benchmarks, models, time periods, and combinations of the same. No study to date has presented convincing evidence that there is persistence in mutual fund performance. Currently, mutual fund research appears to be evolving in the following directions: (1) the assessment of mutual fund performance at the fund family level; (2) the investigation of fund managers’ market timing ability using conditional models of performance, which have not yet been fully exploited; and (3) the evaluation of performance persistence relative to both fund flows and to fund families. Other extant factors in the mutual fund industry, such as increased regulation, will also likely affect the direction of future mutual fund research.