What Drives Investment Flows into Social Trading Portfolios?

We investigate investment flows into more than 5,300 social trading portfolios that are issuedas structured products and are tradable at a regular exchange. We find that investment flowschase past performance. However, in contrast to mutual fund flows, the flow-performancerelation exists nearly exclusively for the best performing social trading portfolios. Flows followraw returns rather than factor model alphas. Additionally, flows are highly persistent. Finally,social trading portfolios with higher visibility on the web page of the social trading platform aswell as traders communicating actively to investors via public comments attract higher inflows