I develop a theory of optimal trading by an institutional trader who receives a parent order (i.e., an overall trading request) from a fund manager to buy a specific quantity of a particular stock over a specified time horizon. The trader selects child orders to be submitted each period over the...

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...