We find that aggregate net equity fund flows are strongly negatively correlated with changes in expected future stock market volatility as measured by the VIX. Implying that investor purchase decisions are primarily driven by returns and sale decisions by risk perceptions, we further find that...

In a standard four factor framework, mutual fund return volatility is a reliable, persistent, and powerful predictor of future abnormal returns. However, the abnormal returns are eliminated by the addition of a “vol” anomaly factor contrasting returns on portfolios of low and high volatility...

We conduct a volatility decomposition to identify the source of performance differences between low volatility and high volatility mutual funds. A higher level of return covariance of fund holdings is associated with more fund-level exposure to the idiosyncratic volatility effect. Average...

Several analysts report explosive annualized Sharpe Ratios (ASRs) for investment portfolio performance evaluation of high frequency traders (HFTers) ranging from 4.3 to 5,000. This suggests that the profitability of HFT is much higher than that of other actively managed portfolios. In highly...

Research that has led to what is known as the “low volatility anomaly” in cross-sectional stocks from a similar universe indicates that volatility is not compensated with a “volatility” premium. We find evidence of a risk premium, but it depends on the definition or measure of risk....

We analyze mutual fund flow-performance relationship using a novel sample of Chinese mutual funds that trade in a volatile market environment. Consistent with existing literature, we find that the net flow to a fund is positively related to past fund performance. However, the positive...

To many people, the terror of falling share prices is often significant, often more so than the pleasure of gains. Accordingly, investors often want to minimize downside volatility as a part of their portfolio planning. Investors already have several tools to measure downside volatility,...

We use unique institutional securities holdings data to examine the trading behaviour of delegated institutional capital and its impact on bond risk premia. We show that institutional fund managers trade strongly procyclically: they actively move into higher yielding, longer duration and lower...

While it is established that idiosyncratic volatility has a negative impact on the cross-section of future stock returns, the relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and future hedge fund returns is largely unexplored. We document that hedge funds with high idiosyncratic volatility...

Institutional funds have concentrated ownership by a few institutional investors, infrequent outflows and essentially no leverage. Yet using unique granular data on the bond holdings of institutional funds, we show that their trading behavior is strongly procyclical: they actively move into...