Stocks with high sentiment betas are more sensitive to investor sentiment, with more subjective valuations. We contend that sentiment beta also captures the duration of mispricing. Accordingly, stocks with high (low) sentiment betas provide opportunities for momentum (contrarian) traders. We...

We link a seemingly biased trading behavior to equilibrium asset prices. U.S. equity mutual fund managers tend to sell both their big winners and big losers. This selling pressure pushes down current prices and leads to higher future returns; aggregating across funds, we nd that securities for...

We show that mutual fund managers' trading experiences bias their future repurchasing decisions. Specifically, a fund is 17% more likely to repurchase a stock when it previously sold the stock for a gain rather than for a loss. Fund managers still prefer to repurchase stocks they sold for a gain...

Mutual funds hold 32% of the U.S. equity market and comprise 58% of retirement savings, yet retail investors consistently make poor choices when selecting funds. Theory suggests that poor choices are partially due to mutual fund managers creating unnecessarily complex disclosures and fee...

This study brings to light the new empirical fact that flows into US domestic equity mutual funds depend less on past fund returns when the risk-free rate declines. A one-percent drop in interest rates is associated with a decrease in the slope of the flow-performance relationship of around 10%....

Research in behavioural finance has shown the importance of investor sentiment to explain stock market returns. In light of the changes in the media landscape from traditional print media towards social media platforms, this paper analyses and compares the ability of investor sentiment measures...

Utilizing monthly aggregate flow data for U.S. equity mutual funds over 1986-2008, we document several new findings on investor behavior. First, we find a strong negative relationship between changes in expected market volatility as measured by the VIX index and net equity fund flows. Second, we...

We show that mutual funds contribute to cross-sectional momentum and excess volatility through positive feedback trading. Stocks held by positive feedback funds exhibit much stronger momentum, almost doubling the returns from a simple momentum strategy. This “enhanced” momentum is robust to...

We use trade-level data to examine the role of actively managed funds (AMFs) in earnings news dissemination. We find AMFs are drawn to, and participate disproportionately more in, earnings announcements (EAs) that include bundled managerial guidance. When the two pieces of news are directionally...

The active share of mutual funds drops significantly when investor sentiment is high, indicating that fund managers reduce their active stock selection and stay closer to their benchmarks during such periods. Our evidence is consistent with fund managers being sentiment-prone—challenging the...