Our speaker will be Martijn Boons (Nova School of Business and Economics).

He will give a talk on "When do Investors Care About Fund Performance?".

Abstract: We revisit some of the most fundamental questions in the mutual fund literature using relatively high-frequency data on fund flows and returns. We show that weekly flows significantly respond to a single day of performance. More surprisingly, this flow-performance sensitivity is mainly driven by days with heightened investor attention, which we show to be days with unusually low market returns (``bad days'') using a novel dataset of traffic to financial websites. Further, in contrast to existing evidence at lower frequencies, flows respond to both out- and underperformance on bad days. These bad day flows represent smart money, because bad day outperformance is persistent and contributes significantly to unconditional fund outperformance. In turn, this persistence reveals specific bad day skill that we argue to be different from general managerial skill.  Overall, the marginal fund investor at higher frequency rewards fund managers with specific bad day skill, which highlights the importance of studying the interaction between fund and market returns for understanding the mutual fund market.

The talk will take place on June 24, 2024 at 12:30 pm in room D3.0.225.