This paper first extends Sias (2004) to examine whether UK fund managers are engaged in herding behaviours in the stock market, their reasons for herding, whether their herding behaviours are different during bullish and bearish periods and whether or not their herding behaviours are...

The paper presents a new approach to optimizing automatic transactional systems. We propose a multi-stage technique which enables us to find investment strategies beating the market. Additionally, new measures of combined risk and returns are applied in the process of optimization. Moreover, we...

This paper examines the style-based feedback trading behavior of mutual fund managers. We provide an empirical version of the model for style-switching behavior of Barberis and Shleifer (2003). We find style-based feedback trading for 77% of the funds, half of which is positive- (negative-)...

We compare the stock return forecasting performance of alternative payout yields. The net payout yield produces more accurate forecasts relative to alternatives, including the traditional dividend yield. This remains true even after excluding several years during the Great Depression when...

This study shows that exchange-traded fund (ETF) misvaluation — based on return differentials between ETFs and their net asset values (NAV) — comove excessively across ETFs. Excess comovements are positive (negative) and significant across ETFs in similar (distant) investment styles. Further...

This paper investigates investor disagreement and clientele effects in performance evaluation by developing a measure that considers the best potential clienteles of mutual funds. In an incomplete market under law-of-one-price and no-good-deal conditions, we obtain an upper bound on admissible...

In this paper we show that simple buy-and-hold strategies over-perform market-timing strategies effectively used by Italian investors in equity mutual funds. We estimate returns from market-timing strategies using aggregate data on net flows for a large sample of equity mutual funds, available...

This paper develops a diagnostic tool for candidate performance measures that accounts for investor disagreement in mutual funds. We compare the evaluation for best clienteles, specified by an upper admissible performance bound, to the one for representative investors implicit in twelve models....

Using a comprehensive sample of 164 domestic equity Smart Beta (SB) ETFs during 2003-2014 period, I analyze whether these funds beat their benchmarks by tilting their portfolios to well-known factors such as size, value, momentum, quality, beta and volatility. I then test if Smart Beta funds...

Closet indexing is the practice of staying close to the benchmark index while still claiming to be an active mutual fund manager and charging active-management fees. Recent work shows that active mutual fund managers are more likely to closet index during down markets. Around the time of the...