We study the informativeness of trades via discount and full-service retail brokers. We find that trades via full-service retail brokers are statistically and economically more informative than are trades via discount retail brokers. This finding holds in every year over the twelve-year sample...

Institutional brokerage rates have been in decline. We investigate whether this reduction has coincided with a fall in benefits provided by brokers to institutional asset managers. We use trade packages from both active and passive equity funds from 1995 to 2001, and active equity funds from...

This study examines a portfolio strategy which selects stocks using the undisclosed monthly holdings of Australian active fund managers. When considering a large range of strategies incorporating fund portfolio holdings information, the top performing strategies are robust to data-snooping and...

This study proposes methodological adjustments to the widely adopted performance benchmarking methodology of Daniel et al. (1997) as a means of improving the precision of alpha measurement for active equity fund managers. We achieve this by considering the monthly updating of characteristic...

Using monthly active equity fund portfolio holdings, we examine the magnitude of style drift and decompose it into active and passive components. We find that while fund style tilts are consistent with their self-stated investment objective, there is variation in the degree of style bias within...

This study investigates the tax efficiency of actively managed equity funds by conducting a previously unaddressed natural experiment. Specifically, we examine whether asset sales were timed to take advantage of the introduction of a substantial discount to realized capital gains when the...

This study provides an empirical examination of derivative instruments used by institutional investors. Our analysis provides a unique insight into the role of derivative securities within portfolios, and the potential benefits from their use. We contribute to the literature using a database...

In a sequence of trades in the same direction across fund managers, we expect the long-term return of a trade to be increasing in the number of subsequent trades if fund managers' trading is driven by private information. In contrast, information cascades imply the lack of such a relationship....

A costly arbitrage model, developed for the Australian imputation tax system, shows that stocks paying dividends with a tax credit are likely targets for ex-dividend arbitrage. We show that order imbalance, based on the direct observation of buyer and seller initiated trades, is a key factor in...

WThis paper uses the trading records of institutional equity funds to examine their ex-dividend trading behavior. There are two classes of funds in the study, which differ in their tax-induced preferences for dividends. The funds engage in both short-term and long-term trading about the...