This paper proposes several new holdings-based measures of fund investment horizon, and examines the relation between manager skills and fund holding horizon. We find that both aggregate holdings and trades of long-horizon funds are informative about superior future long-term stock returns,...

This paper documents the tendency of mutual fund managers to follow analyst recommendation revisions when they trade stocks, and the impact of analyst revisioninduced mutual fund "herds" on stock prices. We find that mutual fund herds follow consensus revisions in analyst recommendations,...

Over the past 30 years, mutual funds have become the dominant vehicle through which individual investors prepare for retirement via defined contribution plans. Further, money market mutual funds, which hold $2.7 trillion as of September 2013, are now a major part of the cash economy in the U.S....

Using a comprehensive database of corporate news, we find that bond funds trade against the direction of news sentiment. The trading against news phenomenon is concentrated in funds selling on positive news and in the post-financial crisis period when dealer liquidity provision is constrained....

This paper develops a new approach that controls for commonalities in actively managed investment fund returns when measuring their performance. It is well-known that many investment funds may systematically load on common priced factors omitted from popular models, exhibit similarities in their...

This paper analyzes the performance of portfolio strategies that invest in noload, open-end U.S. domestic equity mutual funds, incorporating predictability in (i) manager skills, (ii) fund risk-loadings, and (iii) benchmark returns. Predictability in manager skills is found to be the dominant...

This paper provides new evidence supporting the rationality of closed-end fund discounts by analyzing the time-series dynamics of individual fund discounts and their relation to portfolio performance and manager turnover. We show that discount changes reflect rational investor learning about...

This paper implements strategies that use macroeconomic variables to select European equity mutual funds, including Pan-European, country, and sector funds. We find that several macro-variables are useful in locating funds with future outperformance, and that countryspecific mutual funds provide...

We develop a stock return-predictive measure based on an efficient aggregation of the portfolio holdings of all actively managed U.S. domestic equity mutual funds, and use this model to study the source of fund managers' stock-selection abilities. This "generalized-inverse alpha" (GIA) approach...

This paper proposes a new holding horizon (HH) measure of active management and examines the relation between horizon and manager skill. Our HH measure identifies, in the cross-section, funds with higher future long-term alphas, while reported turnover identifies, in the time-series, when a...