“…In all three countries, the national stock exchange indexes (BET, SAX and BUX) had medians of mean returns smaller than those of mutual funds, indicating on overall lower returns and higher risks of the investments in shares quoted at the national stock exchanges, than in mutual funds. These results are consistent with conclusions of other authors (Bakker & Gross, 2004;Filip, 2018) according to which the investment portfolio diversification (Kaur & Kaushik, 2015) and collective investments diminish the risks (Chovancova & Zofcak, 2012). The use of mutual funds as a way of improving the investment management (Filip, 2018) leads to better investment results, as collective investments ensures a better administration of the risk and the application of specific techniques for portfolio management that can distribute the risks across different parts of the financial system (Baker & Gross, 2004).…”