IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rfinst/v20y2007i1p125-150.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does Motivation Matter When Assessing Trade Performance? An Analysis of Mutual Funds

Author

Listed:
  • Gordon J. Alexander
  • Gjergji Cici
  • Scott Gibson

Abstract

We relate the performance of mutual fund trades to their motivation. A fund manager who buys stocks when there are heavy investor outflows is likely to be motivated by the belief that the stocks are significantly undervalued. In contrast, when there are heavy inflows, the manager is likely to be motivated to work off excess liquidity by buying stocks. Our analysis reveals that managers making purely valuation-motivated purchases substantially beat the market but are unable to do so when compelled to invest excess cash from investor inflows. A similar, but weaker, pattern is found for stocks that are sold. (JEL G11, G29) Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Gordon J. Alexander & Gjergji Cici & Scott Gibson, 2007. "Does Motivation Matter When Assessing Trade Performance? An Analysis of Mutual Funds," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(1), pages 125-150, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:20:y:2007:i:1:p:125-150
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhl008
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G29 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Other

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:20:y:2007:i:1:p:125-150. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfsssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.