Galla Salganik-Shoshan

The 'Smart Money' Effect: Retail versus Institutional Mutual Funds

Do sophisticated investors exhibit a stronger “smart money” effect than unsophisticated ones? In this paper, I examine whether fund selection ability of institutional mutual fund investors is better than that of retail mutual fund investors. In line with the studies of Gruber (1996), Zheng (1999), and Keswani and Stolin (2008), I find a smart money effect for investors of both institutional and retail mutual funds. Surprisingly, the results suggest that investors of institutional funds, with a higher representation of more sophisticated investors, do not demonstrate a better fund selection ability.

Predicting stock return correlations with brief company descriptions

ABSTRACT A series of influential papers by Hoberg and Phillips measure the similarity of pairs of companies based on a textual analysis of their business descriptions and show these measures to be useful in a variety of research contexts in finance. Hoberg and Phillips derive the similarity measures from a comparison of word lists extracted from extensive business descriptions contained in US companies’ electronic 10-K filings. Unfortunately, this method is of little use in non-US settings, where lengthy English-language company self-descriptions are not available on a consistent basis. Instead, we use semantic fingerprinting to extract such similarity measures from much shorter but globally available third-party company descriptions. We show that our approach significantly predicts stock return correlations even after controlling for past correlations and for membership in the same industry. Remarkably, company similarity measures based on brief third-party company descriptions predict stock return correlations significantly better than those based on much longer company self-descriptions.

Business Cycle and Investment Flows of Retail and Institutional Mutual Funds

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the dynamics of mutual fund investment flows across the business cycle. To account for the differences in the flow patterns of funds catered for institutional investors and those focusing on retail investors, the author conducts this investigation separately for flows of institutional and retail funds. Design/methodology/approach The author uses the sample of US equity mutual funds for the period between 1999 and 2012. For the samples of each type of fund, the author performs separate analyses for expansion and recession periods. Following Sirri and Tufano (1998), the author implements the Fama MacBeth (1973) approach. Findings The author finds that flow patterns of both fund types vary across the business cycle. For example, the results reveal that during bad times, institutional investors demonstrate weaker return-chasing behavior, while paying higher attention to Jensen’s α, than during good times. In addition, the author reports results on the effect of fund exposure to various systematic risk factors. For instance, the author observes that during economic downturns, investors of both fund types tend to punish managers with higher market exposure. During expansions, the fund’s market exposure positively affects flows of institutional funds, while its effect on the flows of retail funds remains negative. Originality/value To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that investigates mutual fund investment flow patterns across the business cycle, while simultaneously accounting for differences in flow patterns between retail and institutional funds. A further contribution of this paper is that it explores the previously overlooked relationships between fund flows and their exposure to various systematic risk factors.