Using a large transaction level dataset, we find that institutional investors can make economically insignificant -4 to 9 basis points net profit on their marked-to-market portfolio of buy – sell transactions over 1-day to 4-week holding period. The negative net marked-to-market profit comes...

Are portfolio managers skilled or do they trade too much? Using a marked-to-market based“fair-value” method for measuring fund manager skill, we find that institutional managers canpotentially earn +42 (+33) basis points benchmark-adjusted return before transaction costs aftera holding...

Using institutional equity trading data, we find that a set of small institutional investors consistently follow credit ratings issued by an investor-paid rating agency in their trading decisions. Although rating information is credit related, we find that these followers often respond more...

This paper provides evidence that stock traders focus on round numbers as cognitive reference points for value. Using a random sample of more than 100 million stock transactions, we find excess buying (selling) by liquidity demanders at all price points one penny below (above) round numbers....