Sentimental Mutual Fund Flows George J. Jiang and H. Zafer Yüksel June 2018 Abstract The literature documents many stylized empirical patterns for mutual fund flows but offers competing explanations. In the paper, we show that these stylized patterns are mostly driven by investor sentiment, supporting the explanation based on investor behavioral biases. Specifically, we find that when sentiment is high, investors tend to invest more in small-growth funds; investors exhibit a stronger tendency of chasing past fund performance; fund flows are less sensitive to fund expenses; and investors are attracted more to funds with sheer visibility. Moreover, we show that the welldocumented positive relation between fund flows and future fund performance is significant during only high sentiment periods, and yet the predictive power for future fund performance is mainly driven by expected fund flows. These findings are inconsistent with predictions of the smart money hypothesis but support the persistent fund flow hypothesis. George J. Jiang is the Gary P. Brinson Chair of Investment Management at the Department of Finance and Management Science, Carson College of Business, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164. Email address: george.jiang@wsu.edu. Tel: (509) 335-4474, Fax: (509) 335-3857. H. Zafer Yuksel is from the Accounting and Finance Department, College of Management, University of Massachusetts Boston. Email address: zafer.yuksel@umb.edu. Tel: (617) 287-3233. We wish to thank Ben Branch, Travis Box, Laura Cardella, Mine Ertugrul, Douglas J. Fairhurst, Xin Gao, Tyler Hull, Januj Juneja, Hayden Kane, Rui Li, Junghoon Lee, Jordan Neyland, Xuhui Pan, Jerome Taillard, Tong Yao, Yu Yuan, Chi Wan, Mengying Wang, Gulnara Zaynutdinova, Yijia Zhao and seminar participants at the 2016 Boston Area Finance Symposium, Institute of Financial Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Washington State University for helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.
Sentimental Mutual Fund Flows Abstract The literature documents many stylized empirical patterns for mutual fund flows but offers competing explanations. In the paper, we show that these stylized patterns are mostly driven by investor sentiment, supporting the explanation based on investor behavioral biases. Specifically, we find that when sentiment is high, investors tend to invest more in small-growth funds; investors exhibit a stronger tendency of chasing past fund performance; fund flows are less sensitive to fund expenses; and investors are attracted more to funds with sheer visibility. Moreover, we show that the welldocumented positive relation between fund flows and future fund performance is significant during only high sentiment periods, and yet the predictive power for future fund performance is mainly driven by expected fund flows. These findings are inconsistent with predictions of the smart money hypothesis but support the persistent fund flow hypothesis. Keywords: Mutual fund flows; Investor sentiment; Fund performance; Fund expenses; Fund visibility; Flow-performance relation JEL Classification: G11, G02, G23
I. Introduction The literature documents that money flows to mutual funds are related to a number of fund characteristics. Much of the finding reinforces the notion that individual investors are unsophisticated in their investment decisions. For instance, mutual fund investors tend to chase funds with strong past performance, despite the fact that the literature finds evidence of performance persistence only for poor performing funds (Carhart, 1997). 1 The literature shows that benchmark-adjusted fund performance fails to justify fund expenses (Gruber, 1996; Carhart, 1997), yet some investors actually pick funds with high fees. 2 Moreover, investors are attracted to funds with high visibility due to advertising or brand recognition, although very often these characteristics are poor signals of fund manager skills or fund performance. 3 Despite the corroborating evidence on behavioral biases of mutual fund investors, the literature also argues that some stylized findings on mutual fund flows may be driven by rational decisions. For instance, Berk and Green (2004) argue that it is rational for mutual fund investors to chase funds with strong past performance. In their model, rational investors form beliefs about fund manager skill based on past performance and allocate their capital toward recent winners. Furthermore, several studies document a smart-money effect in mutual fund flows. 4 That is, investors have the ability to identify fund managers with superior skills and invest accordingly by moving money toward good performers and away from poor performers. 1 For literature on the relation between flows and past fund performance, see Chevalier and Ellison (1997), Goetzmann and Peles (1997), Sirri and Tufano (1998), and Huang, Wei, and Yan (2007). 2 Sirri and Tufano (1998) find evidence that mutual fund investors pay attention to the cost of investment. Elton, Gruber, and Busse (2004) and Barber, Odean, and Zheng (2005) show that mutual fund investors fail to minimize expenses of investment. Bailey, Kumar, and Ng (2011) show that investors with strong behavioral biases actually select funds with high expenses. 3 For literature on the relation of fund flows with marketing and brand recognition, see Sirri and Tufano (1998), Jain and Wu (2000), and Huang, Wei, and Yan (2007). 4 For literature on the smart-money effect of mutual fund flows, please refer to Gruber (1996), Zheng (1999), Sapp and Tiwari (2004), and Keswani and Stolin (2008). 1
In this study, we investigate the extent to which the stylized findings on mutual fund flows are driven by investor sentiment, i.e., investors subjective view of market conditions. Previous studies show that sentiment directly affects the participation of individual investors and their asset allocation decisions which, in turn, have a significant effect on market returns and individual stock returns (Brown and Cliff, 2005; Baker and Wurgler, 2006; Kumar and Lee, 2006; Lemmon and Portniaguina, 2006; Yu and Yuan, 2011; Stambaugh, Yu, and Yuan, 2012). The literature also shows that mutual fund investors are particularly subject to behavioral biases and sentiment swings (Capon, Fitzsimons, and Prince, 1996; Wilcox, 2003; Bailey, Kumar, and Ng, 2011). Given that mutual fund investments represent a substantial portion of U.S. household portfolios and investor asset allocation decisions have a direct effect on asset prices, it is important to understand mutual fund selection decisions by investors. 5 We are interested in the following questions. First, do investors exhibit the same tendency of chasing past performance across different sentiment periods? As noted earlier, while chasing past performance is generally viewed as evidence of behavioral bias, it may also be consistent with rational models (Berk and Green, 2004). To distinguish trend chasing versus the ability of identifying skilled fund managers, we use both naïve measure (raw fund return) and more sophisticated measure (riskadjusted fund return) of fund performance in our analysis. If performance chasing is rational and driven by fund manager skill, we expect that fund flows are significantly related to risk-adjusted fund returns during both high and low sentiment periods (Del Guercio and Retuter, 2014; Barber, Huang, and Odean, 2016; Berk and Van Binsbergen, 2016). On the other hand, if performance chasing is driven by unsophisticated investors, we should observe a stronger relation between fund flows and 5 Despite the growth of ETFs over the past decades, mutual fund remains an important investment vehicle for U.S. households. According to Investment Company Institute Fact Book, an estimated 94 million individual investors (44% of all U.S. households) owned mutual funds in 2016. The median mutual fund assets held by fund-owning households was $125,000. 2
the naïve performance measure when sentiment is high. Second, are investors equally sensitive to the cost of investing in mutual funds across different sentiment periods? If investors fully understand the effect of expenses on fund returns, we should see no variation in the sensitivity of fund flows to fund expenses across different sentiment periods. However, if sentiment-driven investors do not fully understand the cost of investing in mutual funds, we expect a weaker sensitivity of fund flows to fund expenses during high sentiment periods. Third, are investors equally attracted to funds with high visibility across different sentiment periods? Fund visibility reduces search costs and information barrier for investors, especially unsophisticated investors (Sirri and Tufano, 1998; Huang, Wei, and Yan, 2007). Nevertheless, while marketing effort increases fund visibility, it is shown to have a negative impact on fund performance (Gil-Bazo and Ruiz-Verdu, 2009; Bergstresser, Chalmers, and Tufano, 2009). On the other hand, certain proxies of fund visibility measures, e.g., star manager and fund family size, may be related to fund manager skill or fund performance. In our empirical analysis, we carefully distinguish visibility measures that are potentially related to fund manager skills and other sheer visibility measures that have no effect or even a negative effect on fund performance. We examine how the relations between fund flows and these visibility measures vary across different sentiment periods and draw inference on the behavior of mutual fund investors. Moreover, we are interested in whether the well-documented flow-performance relation varies across different sentiment periods. Gruber (1996) and Zheng (1999) interpret the positive relation between fund flows and future fund performance as evidence of smart-money effect. Several studies offer a competing explanation based on the persistence of fund flows. For example, Wermers (2003) finds that flow-related buying pushes up stock prices beyond the effect of stock return momentum and fund performance is more related to flow-related trades than to manager skill. Similarly, Lou (2012) attributes a positive flow-performance relation to a simple mechanism of price pressure caused by persistence of fund flow. If the positive flow-performance relation is driven by investors fund 3
selection ability, we expect the relation to be stronger during low sentiment periods when investor flow is more likely to be rational due to lower participation of sentiment-driven investors in such periods. On the other hand, if the positive flow-performance relation is driven by persistence of fund flows, we expect the relation to be stronger during high sentiment periods when more sentimentdriven investors participate in the market. The main data used in our study is the CRSP Survivor-Bias-Free U.S. Mutual Fund Database. We use three measures of investor sentiment in our study: the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS), the Index of Consumer Confidence by the Conference Board (CBIND), and the investor sentiment measure proposed by Baker and Wurgler (2006) (BWIND). The ICS is used in our main empirical analysis as it reflects average US households prospect of business and market conditions and has been used in a number of existing studies (Lemmon and Portniaguina, 2006; Bergman and Roychowdhury, 2008; Stambaugh, Yu, and Yuan, 2012; Fong and Toh, 2014; Sibley, Wang, Xing, and Zhang, 2016). We confirm that our results are robust when we use other sentiment measures, including the ICS orthogonalized against macroeconomic variables. Moreover, we show that our results are robust if we exclude financial crisis period from 2007 to 2009 or periods with extreme investor sentiment. Previous literature also shows that institutional investors are more sophisticated and have better understanding of fund characteristics (Keswani and Stolin, 2008; and Evans and Fahlenbrach, 2012). The data allows us to classify mutual funds as retail or institutional funds and compare their fund selection decisions. Our sample period is from January 1993 to December 2014. Our results show that sentiment has a significant impact on investor fund selection decisions. First, we find that there is a greater participation of investors in the market when sentiment is high. Flow to mutual funds, especially to funds of small and growth styles, is significantly higher during high sentiment periods. Second, we find that mutual fund investors exhibit a stronger tendency of chasing 4
past performance during high sentiment periods. Fund flows have a stronger relation with past raw fund returns during high sentiment periods but are equally sensitive to risk-adjusted fund returns during high and low sentiment periods. We interpret these results as evidence that there is a rational component in mutual fund flow driven by fund manager skill, there is nevertheless a significant portion of fund flow driven by sentiment. Third, while fund flows have an overall negative relation with expense ratios, the negative relation is significantly weaker during high sentiment periods. In addition, while there is a significantly negative relation between fund flows and marketing expenses during low sentiment periods, the relation is insignificant during high sentiment periods. These results suggest that sentiment-driven investors do not fully understand the implication of expenses on fund performance. Fourth, to distinguish visibility measures that are potentially related to fund manager skills and sheer visibility measure that has no effect on fund performance, we examine the respective effects of star manager and star-family affiliation on fund flows. Nanda, Wang, and Zheng (2004) show that a naïve strategy of pursuing star-family affiliated funds does not generate positive abnormal performance for fund investors. Our results show that while fund visibility associated with star manager equally attracts fund flows during high and low sentiment periods, sheer fund visibility, i.e., star-family affiliation, attracts greater investor flows during high sentiment periods. Once again, these findings provide further evidence that there is a rational component in mutual fund flow driven by fund manager skill but a significant portion of fund flow driven by investor sentiment. Our results also show that compared to retail investors, institutional investors are less subject to sentiment swings. Specifically, for institutional funds, we find no difference in flow sensitivity to past performance, fund expenses, marketing expenses, or star-family affiliation across different sentiment periods. We also find a clear variation in the flow-performance relation across different sentiment periods. In contrast to predictions of the smart-money hypothesis, we find that the positive flowperformance relation is significant during only high sentiment periods. This suggests that the positive 5
flow-performance relation is unlikely driven by investors ability of picking funds with superior manager skills. Moreover, following previous studies, i.e., Coval and Stafford (2007) and Lou (2012), we decompose fund flows into expected and unexpected components and examine which component has predictive power of future fund performance. If the positive flow-performance relation is due to investors ability to identify superior funds, we should observe that unexpected fund flows predict subsequent fund performance. Again, in contrast to predictions of the smart-money hypothesis, we find no significant relation between unexpected component of fund flows and subsequent fund performance. Instead, the predictive power of fund performance is mainly driven by expected component of fund flows, evidence supporting the explanation based on persistent fund flows. Our study contributes to several strands of literature. First, the literature offers competing arguments on whether investor flow to mutual funds are driven by rational decisions or behavioral biases. We show that sentiment plays an important role in investor fund selection decisions. In particular, fund selection decisions by investors are not only determined by expected fund performance but also by other fund characteristics, such as past performance, expenses, and fund visibility. Second, existing studies show that aggregate mutual fund flows have a direct impact on overall stock market returns (Warther, 1995; Frazzini and Lamont, 2008; Lou, 2012; Ben-Rephael, Kandel, and Wohl, 2011; 2012). Our results show that investor sentiment has a direct effect on aggregate money flows to mutual funds and is likely a significant factor of overall market valuation. Third, our analysis sheds new light on a contentiously debated issue in the mutual fund literature, i.e., whether the positive flow-performance relation is driven by the smart money or persistent fund flows. The finding that fund flows drive future fund performance due to the impact on stock prices has important implications on asset pricing. That is, mutual fund investors are not simply price takers, but 6
play an important role in setting security prices, corroborating evidence in Frazzini and Lamont (2008), and Akbas, Armstrong, Sorescu, and Subrahmanyam (2015). 6 The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the mutual fund data and investor sentiment index used in our analysis. Sections III and IV present main empirical results. Section V performs robustness checks. Section VI concludes. II. Data A. Mutual Fund Sample and Fund Flows The mutual fund data used in this study is obtained from the CRSP Survivor-Bias-Free U.S. Mutual Fund Database. The data contains detailed information on fund characteristics, such as monthly total net assets, fund net returns, turnover, and expense ratios. Our sample includes all actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds. We exclude index funds, international funds, sector funds, specialized funds, and balanced funds. To examine the differences in fund flows between retail and institutional investors, we further divide mutual funds in our sample into institutional funds and retail funds. 7 Our sample period is from January 1993 to December 2014. While the CRSP database provides monthly total net assets (TNA) for mutual funds since 1991, relatively few institutional funds are in the database prior to 1993. Our analysis is based on monthly normalized fund flow (FLOW i,t ) computed as follows: 6 In future research, we intend to examine whether sentiment-driven mutual fund flows help to explain the effect of sentiment on cross-section of stock returns, as documented in the literature (Baker and Wurgler, 2006; Lemmon and Portniaguina, 2006; and Stambaugh, Yu, and Yuan, 2012). 7 We use investor classification provided by the CRSP Mutual Fund Database to classify funds into institutional funds versus retail funds. Since the classification is only available after December 1999, we employ the following procedure of classification prior to December 1999. First, we manually backfill the CRSP investor classifications for those funds that are available in the database after December 1999. Second, for the remaining funds, we rely on a word search algorithm to classify a fund as either institutional fund or retail funds based on fund names. Specifically, we search for words such as institutional shares, institutional class, inst shares, instl, and inst class in fund or fund class names and classify those funds with these keywords in their names as institutional funds. 7
FLOW i,t = (TNA i,t TNA i,t 1 (1 + Ret i,t ) MGTNA i,t )/TNA i,t 1 (1) where TNA i,t and TNA i,t 1 refer to the total net asset of fund i at the end of month t and t 1, respectively. Ret i,t refers to fund return and MGTNA i,t is the increase in TNA due to mergers during the month t. 8 An implicit assumption in Eq. (1) is that new money flow to a fund is invested at the end of the month. Table 1 reports the time-series averages of the cross-sectional mean and median of fund characteristics. On average, there are 2,199 retail funds and 646 institutional funds per month. Retail funds are, on average, larger, older, and belong to larger fund families than institutional funds. Consistent with previous findings (e.g., Evans and Fahlenbrach, 2012), institutional funds have a lower expense ratio at 0.96% compared to 1.44% for retail funds. Table 1 also reports the fund s marketing and operating expenses. Following Sirri and Tufano (1998) and Huang, Wei, and Yan (2007), we define marketing expenses as 12b-1 fees plus one-seventh front-end loads and operating expenses as the difference between expense ratio and 12b-1 fees. While retail funds, relative to institutional funds, have higher marketing expenses, operating expenses of retail and institutional funds are comparable. The average portfolio turnover ratio is similar between retail and institutional funds, 81.10% and 82.27%, respectively. Finally, while the average fund return (net of fees and expenses) is 0.78%, riskadjusted return (four-factor alpha) is -0.08% per month for the whole sample of mutual funds. Both fund return and risk-adjusted return are lower for retail funds, with the difference caused mainly by higher expense ratios for retail funds. B. Investor Sentiment 8 The typical approach in the literature is to use the last net asset value report date of the target fund to identify the approximate merger date. However, this procedure produces noticeable mismatches. We employ the following procedure suggested by Lou (2012) to identify merger date. Specifically, we match a target to its acquirer from t 1 to t + 5 where t is the last report date of the target fund, then we pick the month in which the acquirer has smallest absolute percentage flow as the event month. 8
Investor sentiment reflects the market participants prospect of overall market conditions, asset valuation and investment risk. In this study, we use three most common measures of investor sentiment in the literature: the monthly University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS), and the Index of Consumer Confidence by the Conference Board (CBIND) and the investor sentiment measure proposed by Baker and Wurgler (2006) (BWIND). We use ICS in our main analysis and confirm that the results are robust when we use CBIND or BWIND. ICS is based on investor surveys sent to 500 households and is widely tracked by financial media and analysts. The survey respondents of ICS are asked to assess changes in their financial situation, state of economy, as well as the questions on expected business conditions (both over the next year and over the next five years) and expected changes in the respondent s financial situation over the next year. 9 Qui and Welch (2006) show that ICS is strongly related to investors prospect of market conditions and future stock performance. Moreover, previous studies document a significant relation between ICS, a proxy of investor sentiment, and small-stock premium (Lemmon and Portniaguina, 2006), analysts estimates of future earnings (Bergman and Roychowdhury, 2008), and a broad set of stock return anomalies (Stambaugh, Yu, and Yuan, 2012). Figure 1 plots the monthly ICS during our sample period. Based on the median value of monthly ICS, we classify each month in our sample period (a total of 264 months) as either a high sentiment month or a low sentiment month. C. Fund Flows during Different Sentiment Periods We begin our analysis by examining whether investor participation in mutual funds is affected by market-wide sentiment. Table 2 reports the time-series mean of average normalized fund flow during the whole sample period, as well as high and low sentiment sub-periods. The results are reported 9 For further discussions of the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment and other investor sentiment measures, please see Ludvigson (2004), Qui and Welch (2006), Lemmon and Portniaguina (2006), and Baker and Wurgler (2007). 9
separately for retail funds and institutional funds. Since there was a dramatic negative shock to the market and mutual fund flows during recent financial crisis period from 2007 to 2009, we also report the results after excluding the financial crisis period. 10 For the whole sample period, the average flow is 0.163% for retail funds and 0.378% for institutional funds, respectively. The higher institutional fund flow during our sample period highlights the growth of institutional funds since the early 1990s. Table 2 illustrates a significant difference in investors participation in mutual funds across different sentiment periods. For example, for retail investors in Panel A, the average flow is 0.575% (- 0.255%) during high (low) sentiment period. The difference in retail fund flow between high and low sentiment periods is 0.830% (t statistic = 9.38). This finding suggests that retail fund investors are subject to sentiment swings. Moreover, this difference is not solely driven by financial crisis period, and remain significant even after excluding financial crisis. On the other hand, the participation of institutional investors is less sensitive to market sentiment and the difference in institutional flow between high and low sentiment periods is mainly driven by institutional outflow during financial crisis period. Next, we investigate investor money flows to subsample of funds with different style categories. We follow Nanda, Wang, and Zheng (2004) and classify mutual funds into Small versus Large and Value versus Growth categories based on fund loadings. For each fund, we estimate the Carhart (1997) four-factor model: r i,t = α 4F 4F i + β 1,i MKT t + β 2,i SMB t + β 3,i HML t + β 4,i UMD t + ε t (2) where r i,t is the monthly return of fund i in excess of the 1-month T-bill rate; MKT is the excess return on a value-weighted market portfolio; SMB, HML, and UMD are returns to zero-investment factor mimicking portfolios for size, book-to-market, and momentum in stock returns, respectively. At the end of each month, we use the preceding 36 monthly fund returns with a minimum of 30 monthly 10 According to the Investment Company Institute, there was a net outflow of nearly $200 billion during the period from October 2007 to March 2009. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/economy/ 08stra.html) 10
return observations. Then, we classify mutual funds in the top half of the SMB (HML) loading as Small- (Value-) Style and those in the bottom half as Large- (Growth-) Style. Once again, the results show significant variation in flows into funds of specific styles, particularly retail funds in the Small- and Growth-Style categories, across different sentiment periods. Specifically, the differences in fund flows between high and low sentiment periods are higher for small and growth funds than for large and value funds. These findings are consistent with Baker and Wurgler (2007) who show that fund investors move their money into more speculative fund investment categories (i.e., aggressive growth) than less speculative fund investment categories (i.e., income mixed) when sentiment is high. For retail funds, excluding the financial crisis period of 2007-2009 does not affect the difference in flow across different sentiment periods. In contrast, the differences in institutional flow to these style categories largely disappears after excluding financial crisis period. Overall, the results show that investor participation in mutual fund market varies across high and low sentiment periods, and there is a significantly higher participation of retail investors during high sentiment periods. III. Mutual Fund Flows: High vs. Low Sentiment A. The Effect of Past Performance and Fund Expenses on Fund Flows In this section, we investigate the extent to which investors fund selection decision is driven by investor sentiment. Here we focus on the relation of fund flow with past fund performance and fund expenses. The literature documents that fund investors pay attention to past performance when selecting funds (Gruber, 1996; Sirri and Tufano, 1998; Huang, Wei, and Yan, 2007). However, past fund performance is at best a poor predictor of future performance (Carhart, 1997). There is a debate on the rationality of performance chasing of mutual fund investors. Berk and Green (2004) argue that chasing past performance can be consistent with rational models. If performance chasing is indeed rational and driven by fund manager skill, we expect a significant relation between fund flows and 11
risk-adjusted fund returns during both high and low sentiment periods. As shown in Table 1, retail funds in our sample, on average, charge 144 basis points annually in expenses. However, the literature provides no evidence that funds with higher expense ratios pick stocks well enough to offset the higher fees (Gruber, 1996; and Carhart, 1997). Sirri and Tufano (1998) and Gallaher, Kaniel, and Starks (2006) find a negative relation between fund flows and total fund expenses. These findings suggest that fund investors seem to pay attention to the cost of investment. Other studies document that fund investors fail to minimize fund fees (Capon, Fitzsimons, and Prince, 1996; Barber, Odean, and Zheng, 2005; Choi, Laibson, and Madrian, 2009). In fact, Bailey, Kumar, and Ng (2011) find that investors with strong behavioral biases actually select high expense funds. Once again, if investors fully understand the effect of expenses on net fund returns, we should see no variation in the sensitivity of fund flows to fund expenses across different sentiment periods. To test the above hypotheses, we perform the following regression for the entire sample period, and separately for high versus low sentiment periods: 4F Flow i,t = β 1 α i,t 1 + β 2 Return t 1,t 12 +β 3 Expense Ratio i,t 1 + β 4 Log(Fund Size) i,t 1 +β 5 Log(Fund Age) i,t 1 + β 6 Ret. Vol. i,t 1 + β 7 Turnover i,t 1 + β 8 Log(Family Size) i,t 1 (3) +β 9 Style i,t 1 +β 10 Past Flows i,t 1 + Intercept i,t + ϵ i,t where the dependent variable, Flow i,t, is normalized fund flow. As documented in the literature by, e.g., Kacperczyk, Van Nieuwerburgh, and Veldkamp (2014), fund skills are time-varying. To sharpen our inference on simple trend chasing versus the ability of identifying fund manager skill, we use both naïve performance measure, namely raw fund return (Return t 1,t 12 ), and more sophisticated measure, namely risk-adjusted fund return (α 4F i,t 1 ), in our analysis. While sophisticated investors understand risk-adjusted fund performance, retail investors are more likely to rely on raw fund returns in their fund selection decisions. Recent studies by Berk and Van Binsbergen (2016) and Barber, 12
Huang, and Odean (2016) show that mutual fund investors employ a single factor model (CAPM) when evaluating mutual fund performance. Further, Barber, Huang, and Odean (2016) find that sophisticated investors use more sophisticated benchmarks (i.e., a multi-factor model) to make their capital allocation decisions. Following Del Guercio and Reuter (2014), we measure risk-adjusted fund performance (α 4F i,t 1 ) based on the four-factor alpha over the past 36 months, and raw fund return (Return t 1,t 12 ) based on fund returns over the past twelve months. Moreover, to control for activeness of fund portfolio and risk preferences of mutual fund investors, we include fund return portfolio turnover (Turnover i,t 1 ), fund return volatility (Ret. Vol. i,t 1 ) as the standard deviation of monthly returns over past 12 months, and factor loading on market portfolio (β MKTRF i,t 1 ). In addition, since there are significant differences in fund flow into funds with specific style between high and low sentiment periods as shown in the previous section, we control investors preferences for mutual fund style using factor loadings, β SMB i,t 1, β HML i,t 1, and β UMD i,t 1. In untabulated results, we confirm that the findings are robust to including style fixed effects in Eq. (3). Finally, since fund flow is highly persistent (Coval and Stafford, 2007; Lou, 2012), we include lagged normalized flows over month t 1, t 2, t 3, t 4 to t 6, and t 7 to t 12 as control variables. All variables are defined in Section II.A. The regressions in Eq. (3) are estimated following the Fama-MacBeth (1973) procedure, separately for retail and institutional funds. 11 Table 3 reports time-series averages of coefficient estimates from monthly cross-sectional regressions, the differences in coefficient estimates between high and low sentiment periods, as well as their t statistic based on Newey and West (1987) standard errors that are adjusted for heteroskedasticity and autocorrelations. For brevity, the coefficient 11 As a robustness test, we also follow the literature and perform the regressions by standardizing all variables each month at the cross-section with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of one. This approach mitigates the potential time effect in fund characteristics (Amihud and Mendelson, 1986). The results, unreported for brevity, confirm that the main findings are consistent throughout the paper. 13
estimates of style and past flows are not reported. The results based on the whole sample period are similar to those reported in prior literature (Sirri and Tufano, 1998; Huang, Wei, and Yan, 2007; Evans and Fahlenbrach, 2012). For example, fund flow is positively related to family size and past performance, and negatively related to fund size and age. We also find that fund flow is negatively related to expense ratios for both retail and institutional funds. There are also noticeable differences in preference of fund characteristics between retail and institutional investors. For example, retail investors seem to put money into funds with higher turnover, but flow is negatively related to turnover for institutional investors. In addition, the relation between flow and fund return volatility is significantly negative only for retail funds. Table 3 shows clear variations in the relation between fund flow and past fund performance across different sentiment periods. Fund flows are significantly related to and equally sensitive to riskadjusted fund performance (α 4F i,t 1 ) during both high and low sentiment periods. 12 This suggests that there is a rational component in fund flows that is driven by sophisticated investors searching for fund manager skill, supporting argument in Berk and Green (2004). Nevertheless, the results also show a significant relation between fund flows and past raw fund return (Return t 1,t 12 ) and the relation is significantly stronger during high sentiment periods. The difference in the coefficient estimates of Return t 1,t 12 between the high and low sentiment periods is 0.011 (t statistic = 2.05) for retail funds. We interpret the finding as evidence that fund flows are also driven by sentiment-driven investors chasing funds based on naïve performance measures. The results in Table 3 also show a significant difference in the relation between flow and fund expenses across different sentiment periods. The relation between retail fund flow and expense ratio is significantly weaker during high sentiment periods and the difference in the coefficient estimates of 12 Our results are robust when we use risk-adjusted performance measure based on CAPM. 14
Expense Ratio between high and low sentiment periods is significantly positive (0.184 with t statistic of 3.96). This finding suggests that sentiment-driven retail investors do not seem to fully understand the cost of investing in mutual funds. In summary, the results in Table 3 highlight that investor sentiment plays an important role on fund selection decision of investors. We show that retail investors are more likely to exhibit trend chasing behavior and fail to recognize the cost of their mutual fund investments during high sentiment periods. However, we find no evidence that fund flows by institutional investors are subject to sentiment swings. Institutional flow is equally sensitive to past fund performance, based on both raw fund returns and risk-adjusted fund returns, during high and low sentiment periods. There is no significant difference in the sensitivity of fund flows to fund expenses between high and low sentiment periods for institutional investors. B. The Effect of Marketing Expenses on Fund Flows The results in previous section show that fund investors, particularly retail investors, are less sensitive to total fund expenses during high sentiment periods. Mutual fund expenses fall into two broad categories: operating expenses and marketing expenses. Operating expenses cover costs incurred in portfolio management, fund administration, daily fund accounting and pricing etc., whereas marketing expenses are mainly spent to promote the funds or to pay brokers. Unlike operating expenses that may be related to costs of portfolio management and quality of service provided to investors, the sole goal of marketing expenses is to enhance fund visibility. In this section, we are particularly interested in the relation between fund flows and marketing expenses. The results offer sharper inference on whether investors fully understand the negative impact of expenses on fund performance and also whether investors are attracted to funds with more visibility. Different from other investment products such as stocks and bonds, mutual funds are serviced investment products. Some funds actively market their products through, e.g., advertising, to attract potential investors. Previous studies show that marketing efforts by a fund, i.e., advertising, promotional 15
brochures, website development, reduce investor search costs, especially for unsophisticated investors, and attract more fund flows (Sirri and Tufano 1998; Jain and Wu, 2000; Elton, Gruber, and Busse, 2004; Barber, Odean, and Zheng, 2005; Gallaher, Kaniel, and Starks, 2006; Iannotta and Navone, 2012). However, sophisticated investors should realize that marketing expenses are a significant drain on fund performance. In fact, funds with high marketing expenses mainly target unsophisticated investors (Gil- Bazo and Ruiz-Verdu, 2009). The literature finds no evidence that funds marketing expenses or funds sold through brokers signal superior fund manager ability or better subsequent performance (Jain and Wu, 2006; Christoffersen, Evans, and Musto, 2013). Thus, if marketing expenses have a significant effect on fund selection decisions of unsophisticated investors, we expect the relation between fund flows and marketing expenses to be different during high versus low sentiment periods. To test this hypothesis, we perform the following regression of fund flows on marketing expenses and operating expenses: 4F Flow i,t = β 1 Marketing Expenses i,t 1 + β 2 Operating Expenses i,t 1 + β 3 α i,t 1 + β 4 Return t 1,t 12 +β 5 Log(Fund Size i,t 1 ) + β 6 Log(Fund Age i,t 1 ) +β 7 Ret. Vol. i,t 1 + β 8 Turnover i,t 1 + β 9 Log(Family Size i,t 1 ) (4) +β 10 Style i,t 1 + β 11 Past Flows i,t 1 + Intercept i,t + ϵ i,t where marketing expenses are calculated as 12b-1 fees plus one seventh of the front-end loads and operating expenses are calculated as expense ratio minus 12b-1 fees (Sirri and Tufano, 1998; Elton, Gruber, and Busse, 2004; Bergstresser, Chalmers, and Tufano, 2009). The results in Table 4 show that for the whole sample period, both retail and institutional fund flows are negatively associated with fund marketing and operating expenses. 13 However, fund 13 To reconcile our findings with Barber, Odean, and Zheng (2005) who document a positive relation between fund flow and marketing expenses (12b-1 fees) between 1993 and 1999, we perform the regressions over the same sample period and confirm the significantly positive relation between fund flow and marketing expenses. That is, marketing expenses have a positive effect on fund flows prior to 2000 when investor sentiment is high as shown in Figure 1, but a negative effect over the entire sample period. 16
investors, particularly retail fund investors, are less sensitive to marketing expenses during high sentiment period. Specifically, the relation between retail fund flow and marketing expenses is -0.027 (t statistic = -0.49) when sentiment is high, and significantly negative when sentiment is low (-0.210 with t statistic of -4.39). For retail funds, the difference in the coefficient estimates of Marketing Expenses between during high and low sentiment periods is 0.183 with t statistic of 2.88. Our results suggest that when sentiment is high, retail investors fail to fully understand the negative effect of marketing expenses on fund performance and are more attracted to funds with higher visibility due to marketing efforts, such as advertising. Finally, for institutional investors, we find no significant difference in fund flow sensitivity to marketing expenses between different sentiment periods. This finding provides further support that institutional investors are relatively more sophisticated in their fund selection. C. The Effect of Star Manager and Star-Family Affiliation on Fund Flows The results in previous subsections show that when sentiment is higher, retail investors seem to be attracted more to funds with high visibility as a result of marketing effort. In this section, we use additional fund visibility measures, namely fund family size, a proxy of brand recognition, star manager and star-family affiliation, and examine their effects on investor fund selection decisions. The literature finds that funds belong to well-known large fund families, such as Fidelity and Vanguard, receive greater inflows (Sirri and Tufano, 1998; Nanda, Wang, and Zheng, 2004; Huang, Wei, and Yan, 2007). However, we caution that the positive relation between fund flows and fund family size may not be entirely driven by fund visibility but by fund performance. The literature documents a robust positive relation between fund performance and fund family size (Chen, Hong, Huang, and Kubik, 2004; Pollet and Wilson, 2008). Several studies attribute the positive relation to economies of scale on both resources and costs at the fund family level (Chen, Hong, Huang, and Kubik, 2004; Nanda, Wang, 17
and Zheng, 2004). To better distinguish between the effect of fund visibility that is potentially related to fund manager skill and sheer visibility that is not indicative of superior manager skill, we include two additional fund visibility measures in our analysis, namely star manager and star-family affiliation. The literature documents that funds with stellar performance, as proxied by star funds or managers, not only attract disproportionate inflow to themselves, but also have a positive spillover effect on other funds that belong to the same fund family (Nanda, Wang, and Zheng, 2004; Del Guercio and Tkac, 2008; Khorana and Servaes, 2012). Nevertheless, while star funds earn their reputation from stellar performance, there is no evidence that star-family affiliated funds deliver superior performance. Nanda, Wang, and Zheng (2004) show that a naïve strategy of pursuing star-family affiliated funds does not generate positive abnormal performance for investors. We hypothesize that funds with stellar fund performance attract sophisticated investors but funds with sheer visibility are likely to attract sentiment-driven investors. We perform the following regressions to test the above hypotheses: Flow i,t = β 1 Star i,t 1 + β 2 Star Affiliation i,t 1 +β 3 Log(Family Size i,t 1 ) 4F +β 4 Marketing Expenses i,t 1 + β 5 Operating Expenses i,t 1 +β 6 α i,t 1 + β 7 Return t 1,t 12 +β 8 Log(Fund Size i,t 1 ) + β 9 Log(Fund Age i,t 1 ) (5) +β 10 Ret. Vol. i,t 1 + β 11 Turnover i,t 1 + β 12 Style i,t 1 + β 13 Past Flows i,t 1 +Intercept i,t + ϵ i,t where Star (star fund) is a dummy variable that is set equal to one if a fund is in the top 10% of top performers in its style category and zero otherwise. Specifically, each month and funds are ranked within each style based on the four-factor alpha during the past three years. Star Affiliation (star-family affiliation) is a dummy variable that is equal to one if a fund is affiliated with a family with star fund but is not a star itself and zero otherwise. Family size and all other control variables are as in Section II.B. Table 5 reports the results for retail investors and institutional investors. 18
The results in Table 5 show that for the whole sample period, fund flows are positively related to family size, a proxy for brand recognition, stellar performance (Star), and sheer visibility (Star Affiliation). That is, there is a greater inflow to funds with high visibility. Nevertheless, there is a significantly positive relation between fund flows and star manger (Star) during both high and low sentiment periods. Moreover, the difference in the coefficient estimates of Star is insignificant between high and low sentiment periods. Consistent with findings on the relation between fund flow and riskadjusted fund returns, we interpret the finding as evidence that there is a rational component of fund flows driven by manager skill. The results in Table 5 also show that for retail funds, the positive relations between fund flows and Star Affiliation as well as fund Family Size are stronger during high sentiment periods than during low sentiment periods. The difference in the coefficient estimates of Star Affiliation between high and low sentiment periods is 0.001 (t statistic = 2.12), and the difference in the coefficient estimates of Log(Family Size) between high and low sentiment periods is 0.002 (t statistic = 3.78). The stronger sensitivity of flow to brand recognition during high sentiment period supports the notion that the relation between flow and family size is not entirely driven by rational decisions. That is, there is a significant portion of fund flows driven by investor sentiment. For institutional investors, we find no variation in either brand recognition, stellar performance or sheer visibility between high and low sentiment periods. Once again, this finding supports the view that institutional investors fund purchasing decision is less subject to sentiment swings. IV. Investor Sentiment and Flow-Performance Relation So far, our results show clear variations in fund flows across different sentiment periods, suggesting that sentiment plays an important role in investors fund selection decisions. We now turn our attention to the effect of investor sentiment on the flow-performance relation. Gruber (1996) and Zheng (1999) find a significantly positive fund flow-performance relation and interpret this relation as evidence of the smart-money effect. That is, investors have the ability to pick funds with 19
superior managers and invest accordingly. On the other hand, several studies propose an alternative explanation for the positive flow-performance relation based on the persistence of fund flow. For example, Wermers (2003) shows that fund performance owes more to flow-related trades than to managers skill. Similarly, Lou (2012) argues that better performing funds attract relatively higher flows, which are then reinvested by fund managers into their existing positions. This, in turn, drives up the fund s own performance. Similarly, mutual funds with poor performance tend to liquidate existing holdings to meet redemption. Price pressure from liquidation of recent losers drives down the performance of mutual funds. That is, the positive relation between fund flow and future fund performance is a simple mechanism of price pressure caused by persistent flows to mutual funds. We argue that if the positive flow-performance relation is driven by investors fund selection ability, we expect the relation between fund flow and performance to be stronger during low sentiment periods. This is because mutual fund investors are more likely to make rational decisions and pick superior funds when sentiment is low. On the other hand, if this relation is driven by persistence of fund flow, a positive fund flow-performance relation should be stronger during high sentiment period. In addition, we expect the variation in flow-performance relation, if there is any, across different sentiment periods is more pronounced for retail funds since the participation of retail investors is more sensitive to market sentiment. A. Performance of Fund Flows: Portfolio Approach To examine the effect of sentiment on the flow-performance relation, we form positive and negative fund flow portfolios based on the sign of net flow by each fund during the previous month. We employ the follow the money approach of Elton, Gruber and Blake (1996) and Gruber (1996) to deal with merged funds. This approach mitigates the survivorship bias and assumes that investors in merged funds put their money in the surviving fund and continue to earn the return on the surviving 20
funds. Each month, returns of positive and negative flow portfolios are computed for both equal- and flow-weighted portfolios. The latter uses a fund s cash flows during the previous month as weights and, as a result, places greater emphasis on funds that experience larger fund inflows or outflows. The flow-weighted portfolios capture more accurately the performance of investor flow in and out of mutual funds. To evaluate the performance of the positive and negative flow portfolios, we estimate the Carhart (1997) four-factor model which is specified as follows: r p,t = α 4F p + β 1,p MKT t + β 2,p SMB t + β 3,p HML t + β 4,p UMD t + ε p (6) where r p,t is the monthly return on a portfolio of funds in excess of the 1-month T-bill rate; MKT is the return on a value-weighted market portfolio excess of the 1-month T-bill rate; SMB, HML and UMD are the returns on a zero-investment factor mimicking portfolios for size, book-to-market, and momentum, respectively. Table 6 reports the performance of average, positive, and negative flow portfolios based on the four-factor model, as well as the difference in factor alpha (α 4F ) between positive and negative flow portfolios. We note that all flow-sorted portfolios have negative abnormal returns, consistent with the literature that mutual funds, after expenses and accounting for momentum, on average underperform their benchmarks (Carhart, 1997; Sapp and Tiwari, 2004). More importantly, Table 6 shows a positive relation between retail fund flow and future fund performance for retails funds during the whole sample period. Specifically, the difference in α 4F between positive and negative retail flow portfolios is significantly positive for flow-weighted portfolios. On the other hand, for institutional funds, we find no significant differences in α 4F between positive and negative flow portfolios. Overall, these results suggest the positive fund flow-performance relation is driven mainly by retail funds. As pointed out earlier, the literature offers two competing explanations for the positive flowfuture performance relation, namely the smart-money hypothesis and persistent-flow hypothesis. To distinguish these two explanations, we examine flow-performance relation during different sentiment periods. Table 6 shows a significant difference in the predictability of investor flow for future fund 21