Are Institutional Investors Truly Skilled or Merely Opportunistic?

July 27, 2013 Leave a comment

Are Institutional Investors Truly Skilled or Merely Opportunistic?

Gennaro Bernile Singapore Management University – School of Business; University of Miami – School of Business Administration

Alok Kumar University of Miami – School of Business Administration

Johan Sulaeman Southern Methodist University (SMU) – Edwin L. Cox School of Business

Qin Wang University of Michigan – Dearborn

July 25, 2013

Abstract: 
Using a large dataset of institutional trades, we examine whether superior intraquarter trading performance of institutional investors reflects superior trading skill or opportunistic access to information. Our conjecture is that true investment skill would not depend upon geographical proximity between investors and firms, while opportunistic access to information is likely to be location-dependent. Thus, if institutions are truly skilled, they would earn high average return and exhibit performance persistence in both their local and nonlocal trades. Our evidence indicates that institutions on average are not skilled and their superior intraquarter performance is more likely to reflect opportunistic access to short-term local information. They have high average local performance but this performance is not persistent. Further, we observe increased local trading activity and profitability prior to earnings announcements, particularly before negative news. In contrast, the average net non-local intraquarter trading profits are not significantly different from zero. There is persistence in non-local performance, however, which suggests that some investors in the cross-section may be skilled. Specifically, investors with superior non-local performance exhibit superior future performance in both non-local and local trades. This evidence indicates that superior performance in non-local trades is a better indicator of innate trading skill.

Filed under Research

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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