Using a novel measure of stock-level trade imitation, we uncover "smart" copycats: fund managers that use their own information when beneficial, and otherwise imitate other managers' better trades. Contrary to previous research, we find that these partial imitation strategies lead to...

We introduce a novel methodology to identify copycat behavior in mutual funds. We find that imitation is pervasive in the mutual fund industry. While most copycats underperform, a small number are 'smart imitators'. We find that funds at the high and low ends of the Copycat Score range...

The biggest challenge in testing mutual funds for manager skill is the lack of a probability distribution of returns under the null hypothesis of no skill. A methodology based on randomly trading portfolios and non parametric statistical tests is explored, and a test of skill is proposed....

Reference-day risk has been previously identified as a type of sampling variation phenomenon, and its effect on the estimation of stock returns and their volatility and market betas have been documented. Using a dataset of daily equity mutual fund returns, we extend previous studies to analyze...

The concept of fund manager herding has been studied in depth, and the most widely used measure applied to this market-wide phenomena is the one incepted in Lakonishok, Shleifer & Vishny (1992), LSV. However, this measure has been much criticized, and its validity is still in doubt. This paper...