Why do investors entrust active mutual fund managers with large sums of money while receiving negative excess returns on average? Our explanation is that investors have a coarser information set than fund managers which leads them to systematically misinterpret managers' skill. When investors...

This paper evaluates fund managers’ trading skills using a novel dataset of daily mutual fund transactions. We document strong evidence of short term trading performance for both buys and sells lasting up to one month. By establishing a link between a fund’s trades, holdings, and reported...