During the last decade, the U.S. mutual fund industry experienced an unprecedented movement toward passive investments. We tie this shift to underperformance in active funds stemming from a reduction in alpha opportunities. As alpha opportunities decrease, performance predictors like Active...

Hedge fund flows chase alpha, yet they also follow returns attributable to traditional and exotic risk exposures. Investors appear more cognizant of exotic risks over time, with flows increasing their relative emphasis on returns from exotic betas in recent years. Investors also discriminate...

CAPM alpha explains hedge fund flows better than alphas from more sophisticated models. This suggests that investors pool together sophisticated model alpha with returns from exposures to traditional (except for the market) and exotic risks. We decompose performance into traditional and exotic...

We examine the determinants and consequences of broker-hosted investor conferences. We find the number of brokers hosting a firm at conferences is positively related to institutional ownership and intangible assets, consistent with greater client demand for management access among hard-to-value...

We study the effects of social media on the informativeness of retail investor trading. Our identification strategy exploits the editorial delay between report submission and publication on Seeking Alpha, a popular crowdsourced investment research platform. We find the ability of retail order...