Francesco A. Franzoni

Hedge Fund Stock Trading in the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009

We document a drastic reduction in hedge fund stock ownership during the recent financial crisis. In the two quarters around the Lehman collapse (2008Q3-Q4), hedge funds cut their equity holdings by about 29% and nearly every fourth fund dumped more than 40% of its equity portfolio in each quarter. We directly establish that investor redemptions were a primary driver of these selloffs and provide suggestive evidence that pressure from lenders was also an important determinant of stock sales. These channels were more relevant for funds with low restrictions on investors’ withdrawals and low bargaining power vis-a-vis their brokers. Also consistent with fire sales, hedge funds were more likely to sell high-volatility stocks and liquid stocks. Finally, we show indirect evidence suggesting that part of the stock selloffs occurred because hedge funds reallocated capital to other assets in a flight to quality or in pursuit of profit opportunities. _____________________ * We thank Viral Acharya, Giovanni Barone-Adesi, Alexander Eisele, Vyacheslav Fos, Craig Furfine, YeeJin Jang, Pete Kyle, Jose-Miguel Gaspar, Massimo Massa, Loriana Pelizzon, Alberto Plazzi, Steven Ongena, Tarun Ramadorai, Ronnie Sadka, Rene Stulz, Dimitri Vayanos, and seminar and conference participants at the Ohio State University, the 2 Annual Conference on Hedge Funds in Paris, the 3 Erasmus Liquidity Conference, the Wharton/FIRS pre-conference, the FIRS conference (Florence), LUISS University (Rome), and the C.R.E.D.I.T. Conference (Venice), for helpful comments.

Private Equity Performance and Liquidity Risk

Private equity has traditionally been thought to provide diversi…cation bene…ts. However, these benefi…ts may be lower than anticipated. We …find that private equity suffers from signifi…cant exposure to the same liquidity risk factor as public equity and other alternative asset classes. The unconditional liquidity risk premium is close to 3% annually and, in a four-factor model, the inclusion of this liquidity risk premium reduces alpha to zero. In addition, we provide evidence that the link between private equity returns and overall market liquidity occurs via a funding liquidity channel.

Learning About Beta: Time-Varying Factor Loadings, Expected Returns, and the Conditional CAPM

This paper explores the theoretical and empirical implications of time-varying and unobservable beta. Investors infer factor loadings from the history of returns via the Kalman filter. Due to learning, the history of beta matters. Even though the conditional CAPM holds, standard OLS tests can reject the model if the evolution of investors expectations is not properly modelled. The authors use their methodology to explain returns on the twenty-five size and book-to-market sorted portfolios. Their learning version of the conditional CAPM produces pricing errors that are significantly smaller than standard conditional or unconditional CAPM and the model is not rejected by the data.

Do ETFs Increase Volatility

Recent literature suggests that trading by institutional investors may affect the first and second moments of returns. Elaborating on this intuition, we conjecture that arbitrageurs can propagate liquidity shocks between related markets. The paper provides evidence in this direction by studying Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), an asset class that has gained paramount importance in recent years. We report that arbitrage activity occurs between ETFs and the underlying assets. Then, we show that ETFs increase the volatility of the underlying assets, and that the prices of the underlying assets are affected by shocks to ETFs. Finally, we present findings consistent with the idea that ETFs served as a conduit for shock propagation between the futures market and the equity market during the Flash Crash on May 6, 2010. Overall, our results suggest that arbitrage activity may induce contagion.

Fund Flows and Market States

This paper establishes a new empirical fact: Mutual funds’ flow-performance sensitivity is a hump-shaped function of aggregate risk-factor realizations. Explanations based on extant theories can explain only a fraction of the pattern. We thus develop a new parsimonious model. It assumes Bayesian investors who are uncertain about the degree to which fund returns are exposed to systematic risk. Fund performance is then less informative about manager skill when factor realizations are larger in absolute value. The data also support the out-of-sample prediction that the hump shape is more pronounced for funds with more uncertain risk loadings.Received October 24, 2014; editorial decision October 11, 2016 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

Exchange Traded Funds (Etfs)

Over two decades, ETFs have become one of the most popular investment vehicle among retail and professional investors due to their low transaction costs and high liquidity, taking market share from traditional investment vehicles such as mutual funds and index futures. Research has shown that in addition to the benefits of enhanced price discovery, ETFs add noise to the market: prices of underlying securities have higher volatility, greater price reversals, and higher correlation with the index. Arbitrage activity is a necessary component in minimizing the price discrepancy between ETFs and the underlying securities. During turbulent market episodes, however, arbitrage is limited and ETF prices diverge from those of the underlying securities.

The Changing Nature of Market Risk

In the first three decades of CRSP data, value stocks have higher betas than growth stocks. Later on, the ranking is reversed and the gap in beta widens. What makes growth strategies nowadays bear more market risk than value strategies? What are the causes of the reversal in the ranking of betas? The paper argues that the negative link between beta and BM is due to growth options. The shift of listed firms towards more growth-oriented businesses has progressively changed the nature of market risk. The ultimate determinant of this evolution is conjectured to be financial market development, which has lowered the cost of capital. For this reason, the facts described in this paper resonate with other long-run phenomena, such as the rise in idiosyncratic risk and the R&D boom.

The Relevance of Broker Networks for Information Diffusion in the Stock Market

This paper shows that the network of relationships between brokers and institutional investors shapes the information diffusion in the stock market. We exploit trade-level data to show that central brokers gather information by executing informed trades, which is then leaked to their best clients. We show that after large informed trades, a significantly higher volume of other institutional investors execute similar trades through the same broker, allowing them to capture higher returns in the first few days after the initial trade. In contrast, we find that when the informed asset manager is affiliated with the broker, such imitation does not occur. Similarly, we show that the clients of the broker employed by activist investors to execute their trades tend to buy the same stocks just before the filing of the 13D. This evidence also suggests that an important source of alpha for fund managers is the access to better connections rather than superior skill.

The Granular Nature of Large Institutional Investors

Over the last four decades, the concentration of institutional assets in equity markets has increased dramatically. We conjecture that large institutions are granular, that is, they cannot be reduced to a collection of smaller independent entities. Hence, the paper studies whether large institutional ownership has a significant impact on asset prices. We provide evidence of a causal effect of ownership by large institutions on the volatility of their stock holdings. As a potential channel for this effect, we show that large institutions generate higher price impact than smaller institutions. Their trades are larger and concentrated on fewer stocks than those of smaller firms. Moreover, the investor flows to units within the same family are more correlated than the flows to independent entities. Finally, the effect of large institutions on volatility is unlikely to be related to improved price discovery, because the stocks owned by large institutions exhibit stronger price inefficiency.

Financial Conglomerate Affiliated Hedge Funds: Risk Taking Behavior and Liquidity Provision

This paper explores how affiliation to financial conglomerates affects asset managers’ access to capital, trading behavior, and performance. Focusing on a sample of hedge funds, we find that financial-conglomerate-affiliated hedge funds (FCAHFs) have lower flow-performance sensitivity than other hedge funds and that this difference is particularly pronounced during financial turmoil. Arguably, thanks to more stable funding, FCAHFs allow their investors to redeem capital more freely and are able to capture price rebounds. Since investors may value these characteristics, our findings provide a rationale for why financial conglomerate affiliation is widespread, although it slightly hampers performance on average.