When Does a Mutual Fund's Trade Reveal its Skill?

Zhi Da, Pengjie Gao and Ravi Jagannathan

No 13625, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We conjecture that a mutual fund manager with superior stock selection ability is more likely to benefit from trading in stocks affected by information-events. Taking the probability of informed trading (PIN, Easley, Kiefer, O'Hara, and Paperman, 1996) to measure the amount of informed trading in a stock, and inferring mutual fund trades from a large sample of mutual fund holdings, we provide empirical support for the conjecture. Funds trading high-PIN stocks exhibit superior performance on average, and superior performance that is more likely to persist. The findings are not due to price momentum or the higher returns earned by high-PIN stocks on average. Conclusions remain the same after testing for alternative measures for the amount of informed trading. Decomposing a fund's stock selection ability into "informed trading" and "liquidity provision" adds further insight into fund's underlying strengths. Impatient informed trading is a significant source of alpha for funds trading high-PIN stocks, while liquidity provision is more important as a source of alpha for funds trading low-PIN stocks.

JEL-codes: G1 G11 G12 G14 G23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fmk and nep-mst
Note: AP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as “Impatient Trading, Liquidity Provision, and Stoc k Selection by Mutual Funds” (with Pengjie Gao and Ravi Jagannathan), Review of Financial Studies , Vol 24, 675-720 (2011)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13625.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13625

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13625

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().