In order to shed light on the "black box" of institutional equity investing in a systematic manner, I conducted a broadly based questionnaire which received a large response from German mutual fund companies. The survey asked fund managers for their basic views and practices and for insights...

In order to shed light on the "black boxʺ of institutional equity investing in a systematic manner, I conducted a broadly based questionnaire which received a large response from German mutual fund companies. The survey asked fund managers for their basic views and practices and for insights...

Closet indexing is the practice of staying close to the benchmark index while still claiming to be an active mutual fund manager and charging active-management fees. Recent work shows that active mutual fund managers are more likely to closet index during down markets. Around the time of the...

In this paper we provide a comprehensive analysis of the performance of US SRI mutual funds as well as its relation to the flow of new money that those funds experience in the context of investors sophistication. In particular, we compare the performance of SRI retail and institutional...

Ideally, an index fund should provide the best possible tradeoff between expected return and risk for the investor who has no research advantage. A number of practical problems arise, however, when one attempts to translate this ideal into practice. Even in the absence of a research advantage, a...

An idealized model of the investment process redefines the respective roles of security analysts and portfolio managers, quantifies such concepts as activity and aggressiveness, and explains how the individual analyst's efforts at forecasting returns translate into improved portfolio performance

In order to shed light on the "black box" of institutional equity investing in a systematic manner, I conducted a broadly based questionnaire which received a large response from German mutual fund companies. The survey asked fund managers for their basic views and practices and for insights...

We develop a High Frequency (HF) trading strategy where the HF trader uses her superior speed to process information and to post limit sell and buy orders. By introducing a multi-factor mutually-exciting process we allow for feedback effects in market buy and sell orders and the shape of the...

This paper documents a stark periodicity in intraday volume and in the number of trades. We find activity in both variables spikes by about 20% at regular intervals of 5 or 10 minutes throughout the trading day. We argue that this activity is the result of algorithmic trading influenced by human...