Which Money is Smart? Mutual Fund Buys and Sells of Individual and Institutional Investors

Gruber (1996) and Zheng (1999) report that investors channel money towards mutual funds that subsequently perform well. Sapp and Tiwari (2004) find that this smart money effect no longer holds after controlling for stock return momentum. While prior work uses quarterly U.S. data, we employ a British data set of monthly fund inflows and outflows differentiated between individual and institutional investors. We document a robust smart money effect in the U.K. The effect is caused by buying (but not selling) decisions of both individuals and institutions. Using monthly data available post-1991 we show that money is comparably smart in the U.S