I study the market for lending and borrowing securities in the United States. I find that by making securities available for borrowing, mutual funds acquire information about short selling, which they exploit for trading. Funds with discretion in their investment choices rebalance their...

A high liquidity, low expense ratio and the possibility to conduct arbitrage allow exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to be used for short sales. Bearish investors can also buy inverse ETFs. This paper aims to outline two investment approaches for bearish ETF investors and the differences between...

A stock's inclusion in an ETF has the potential to reduce its short sale constraints by decreasing search costs and lowering recall risk. This paper examines how the introduction of ETFs impacts short interest levels of their constituent stocks. We find that short selling in the underlying...

Using microdata on stock-level lending positions from German mutual funds, we show that active funds use the equity lending market to obtain information about short sale demand. Funds reduce long positions in response to these demand signals, which allows fund managers to front-run public...

We use price pressure resulting from purchases by mutual funds with large capital inflows to identify overvalued equity. This is a relatively exogenous overvaluation indicator as it is associated with who is buying, buyers with excess liquidity, rather than what is being purchased. We document...

Passive investing, particularly in emerging markets, has become an increasingly popular means of quick, “diversified” exposure to a particular segment of the markets. Defensive investors, as Benjamin Graham noted, would be best served owning a diversified list of leading companies. Yet it's...

We propose a measure of dispersion in fund managers’beliefs about future stock returns based on their active holdings, i.e., deviations from benchmarks. We fi nd that both the level of and the change in dispersion positively predict subsequent stock returns on a risk-adjusted basis. This effect...

ETFs attract a larger proportion of institutional investors than do the underlying markets. The price of an ETF will deviate from the price of the underlying, if institutional investors are less prone to investor sentiment-driven mispricing, than are retail investors. We employ a unique...

Stock momentum, long-term reversal, and other past return characteristics that predict future returns also predict future realized betas, suggesting these characteristics capture time-varying risk compensation. We formalize this argument with a conditional factor pricing model. Using...

We document economically large momentum profits when sorting ETFs on returns over the past two to four years. A value-weighted, long-short strategy based on ETF momentum delivers Carhart (1997) four-factor alphas of up to 1.20% per month. Neither cross-sectional stock momentum nor co-variation...