Taking a firm's competitive position into account benefits investors who are better at evaluating this qualitative information. I find that fund managers who overweight companies with market power outperform their peers. Placebo exercises and an exogenous shock to product market competition...

We investigate the relationship between a mutual fund's variation in factor exposures and its future performance. Using a dynamic state space version of Carhart (1997)'s four factor model to capture factor variation, we find that funds with volatile factor exposures underperform funds with...

This study provides evidence for a positive association between mutual fund holdings'implied cost of capital (ICC) and future performance. Consistent with large transactioncosts of ICC-based investments impeding their exploitation and employing a ICC-basedstrategy reflecting skill, family-level...

We study the dynamics of fund manager ownership for a sample of U.S. equity mutual funds from 2005 to 2011. We find that ownership changes positively predict changes in future risk-adjusted fund performance. A one-standarddeviation increase in ownership predicts a 1.6 percent increase in alpha...

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....

We examine the impact of ETF ownership on the commonality in liquidity of underlying stocks, while controlling for other institutional ownership. Analyses using aggregate stock-level ETF ownership and common ETF ownership at the stock-pair level indicate that ETF ownership significantly...

More and more investors apply socially responsible screens when building their stock portfolios. This raises the question whether these investors can increase their performance by incorporating such screens into their investment process. To answer this question we implement a simple trading...

Option-implied betas are a promising alternative to historical beta estimators, because they are inherently forward-looking and can incorporate new information immediately and fully. Recently, different implied beta estimators have been developed in previous literature, but very little is known...

This paper analyzes trading strategies designed to exploit the low-beta anomaly. Although the notion of buying low-beta stocks and selling high-beta stocks is natural, a choice is necessary with respect to the relative weighting of high-beta stocks and low-beta stocks in the portfolio. Our...

Short sellers are perceived as informed, sophisticated investors. Yet little is known about their actual performance and trading strategies. Using a novel, hand-collected data set of daily position disclosures in Europe, we identify the entry, change, and exit dates of large short-sale positions...