Abstract
This study analyzes the dynamics of daily mutual fund flows. A Vector Auto Regression (VAR) of flows and returns shows that the behavior of fund investors is more consistent with contrarian rather than momentum characteristics. Past fund flows have a positive impact on future fund returns, with the long-term information effect dominating the transient price-pressure effect. Seasonality in daily flows, such as day-of-week and day-of-month patterns are present, and daily flows are generally mean-reverting. Probit regressions indicate that fund investment objective, marketing policy and level of active management explain cross-sectional variation in the behavioral patterns displayed in daily flows. Our results are robust to the different methods of calculating daily flows based on whether or not the day-end TNA figures include the current-day’s flow. Throughout the analysis, we contrast the dynamics of daily flows with established results for monthly fund flows and find important differences between the two.
Recommended Citation
Rakowski, David and Wang, Xaioxin. "The Dynamics of Short-term Mutual Fund Flows and Returns: A Time-series and Cross-sectional Investigation." (Nov 2009).
Comments
Published in Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 33, No. 11 (November 2009) at 10.1016/j.jbankfin.2009.05.001