IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/118854.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Why don't most mutual funds short sell?

Author

Listed:
  • Li, Li
  • Huang, Shiyang
  • Lou, Dong
  • Shi, Jiahong

Abstract

An intriguing observation in the US mutual fund industry is that most equity funds do not short sell, even though virtually all regulatory restrictions on short selling had been lifted by 1997. We shed light on this puzzle by conducting the first systematic analysis of long-short equity funds' portfolio compositions, fund performance, and capital flows. Our results reveal that: 1) long-short mutual funds hold substantially more cash than their long-only peers and have a market beta significantly below one; 2) long-short funds generate a large positive alpha of 5% a year in risky holdings but slightly underperform their long-only peers in total returns; and 3) long-short funds face much higher flow-performance sensitivities and are more prone to use cash to absorb capital flows. We discuss several possible explanations for these findings.

Suggested Citation

  • Li, Li & Huang, Shiyang & Lou, Dong & Shi, Jiahong, 2021. "Why don't most mutual funds short sell?," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 118854, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:118854
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/118854/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Choi, Jaewon & Hoseinzade, Saeid & Shin, Sean Seunghun & Tehranian, Hassan, 2020. "Corporate bond mutual funds and asset fire sales," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(2), pages 432-457.
    2. Itzhak Ben-David & Jiacui Li & Andrea Rossi & Yang Song, 2022. "What Do Mutual Fund Investors Really Care About?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 35(4), pages 1723-1774.
    3. Chen, Honghui & Desai, Hemang & Krishnamurthy, Srinivasan, 2013. "A First Look at Mutual Funds That Use Short Sales," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 48(3), pages 761-787, June.
    4. Lee, Charles M C & Shleifer, Andrei & Thaler, Richard H, 1991. "Investor Sentiment and the Closed-End Fund Puzzle," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(1), pages 75-109, March.
    5. Marcin Kacperczyk & Clemens Sialm & Lu Zheng, 2008. "Unobserved Actions of Mutual Funds," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 21(6), pages 2379-2416, November.
    6. Vikas Agarwal & Haibei Zhao, 2019. "Interfund Lending in Mutual Fund Families: Role in Liquidity Management," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(10), pages 4079-4115.
    7. Coval, Joshua & Stafford, Erik, 2007. "Asset fire sales (and purchases) in equity markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(2), pages 479-512, November.
    8. Dong Lou, 2012. "A Flow-Based Explanation for Return Predictability," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 25(12), pages 3457-3489.
    9. Wei Jiang & Jitao Ou & Zhongyan Zhu, 2021. "Mutual Fund Holdings of Credit Default Swaps: Liquidity, Yield, and Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(2), pages 537-586, April.
    10. Christopher G. Schwarz & Mark E. Potter, 2016. "Revisiting Mutual Fund Portfolio Disclosure," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 29(12), pages 3519-3544.
    11. Chernenko, Sergey & Sunderam, Adi, 2016. "Liquidity transformation in asset management: Evidence from the cash holdings of mutual funds," ESRB Working Paper Series 23, European Systemic Risk Board.
    12. Mariassunta Giannetti & Bige Kahraman, 2018. "Open-End Organizational Structures and Limits to Arbitrage," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 31(2), pages 773-810.
    13. Jennifer Lynch Koski & Jeffrey Pontiff, 1999. "How Are Derivatives Used? Evidence from the Mutual Fund Industry," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(2), pages 791-816, April.
    14. Fama, Eugene F. & French, Kenneth R., 2015. "A five-factor asset pricing model," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(1), pages 1-22.
    15. Shiyang Huang & Maureen O’Hara & Zhuo Zhong, 2021. "Innovation and Informed Trading: Evidence from Industry ETFs [Short interest, institutional ownership, and stock returns]," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 34(3), pages 1280-1316.
    16. repec:oup:revfin:v:29:y:2016:i:12:p:3519-3544. is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Stambaugh, Robert F. & Yu, Jianfeng & Yuan, Yu, 2012. "The short of it: Investor sentiment and anomalies," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(2), pages 288-302.
    18. Agarwal, Vikas & Boyson, Nicole M. & Naik, Narayan Y., 2009. "Hedge Funds for Retail Investors? An Examination of Hedged Mutual Funds," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 44(2), pages 273-305, April.
    19. Jeremy C. Stein, 2005. "Why are Most Funds Open-End? Competition and the Limits of Arbitrage," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(1), pages 247-272.
    20. Byoung-Hyoun Hwang & Baixiao Liu & Wei Xu, 2019. "Arbitrage Involvement and Security Prices," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(6), pages 2858-2875, June.
    21. Sergey Chernenko & Adi Sunderam, 2016. "Liquidity Transformation in Asset Management: Evidence from the Cash Holdings of Mutual Funds," NBER Working Papers 22391, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    22. Almazan, Andres & Brown, Keith C. & Carlson, Murray & Chapman, David A., 2004. "Why constrain your mutual fund manager?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(2), pages 289-321, August.
    23. Wermers, Russ, 2012. "A matter of style: The causes and consequences of style drift in institutional portfolios," CFR Working Papers 12-04, University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR).
    24. Chernenko, Sergey & Sunderam, Adi, 2016. "Liquidity Transformation in Asset Management: Evidence form the Cash Holdings of Mutual Funds," Working Paper Series 2016-05, Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics.
    25. Franzoni, Francesco & Giannetti, Mariassunta, 2019. "Costs and benefits of financial conglomerate affiliation: Evidence from hedge funds," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(2), pages 355-380.
    26. Joseph Chen & Harrison Hong & Ming Huang & Jeffrey D. Kubik, 2004. "Does Fund Size Erode Mutual Fund Performance? The Role of Liquidity and Organization," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(5), pages 1276-1302, December.
    27. Jeffrey Pontiff, 1996. "Costly Arbitrage: Evidence from Closed-End Funds," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 111(4), pages 1135-1151.
    28. Simon Gervais & Günter Strobl & Francesca Cornelli, 2020. "Transparency and Talent Allocation in Money Management," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 33(8), pages 3889-3924.
    29. Joshua M. Pollet & Mungo Wilson, 2008. "How Does Size Affect Mutual Fund Behavior?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(6), pages 2941-2969, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Graziano, Marco & Habib, Maurizio Michael, 2024. "Mutual funds and safe government bonds: do returns matter?," Working Paper Series 2931, European Central Bank.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dekker, Lennart, 2024. "Essays on asset liquidity and investment funds," Other publications TiSEM 5fc9bf77-84e7-4a36-9e3a-1, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    2. Molestina Vivar, Luis & Wedow, Michael & Weistroffer, Christian, 2023. "Burned by leverage? Flows and fragility in bond mutual funds," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 354-380.
    3. Wang, Z. Jay & Yang, Jingyun, 2021. "Cross-trading and liquidity management: Evidence from municipal bond funds," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    4. Aragon, George O. & Kim, Min S., 2023. "Fire sale risk and expected stock returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 149(3), pages 578-609.
    5. Peress, Joel & Schmidt, Daniel, 2021. "Noise traders incarnate: Describing a realistic noise trading process," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).
    6. Dekker, Lennart & Molestina Vivar, Luis & Wedow, Michael & Weistroffer, Christian, 2024. "Liquidity buffers and open-end investment funds: Containing outflows or reducing fire sales?," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    7. Martin Rohleder & Dominik Schulte & Janik Syryca & Marco Wilkens, 2018. "Mutual Fund Stock†Picking Skill: New Evidence from Valuation†versus Liquidity†Motivated Trading," Financial Management, Financial Management Association International, vol. 47(2), pages 309-347, June.
    8. Jiang, Hao & Li, Yi & Sun, Zheng & Wang, Ashley, 2022. "Does mutual fund illiquidity introduce fragility into asset prices? Evidence from the corporate bond market," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(1), pages 277-302.
    9. Dekker, Lennart & Molestina Vivar, Luis & Wedow, Michael & Weistroffer, Christian, 2023. "Liquidity buffers and open-end investment funds: containing outflows and reducing fire sales," Working Paper Series 2825, European Central Bank.
    10. Chang, Xiaochen & Guo, Songlin & Huang, Junkai, 2022. "Kidnapped mutual funds: Irrational preference of naive investors and fund incentive distortion," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    11. Dunhong Jin & Marcin Kacperczyk & Bige Kahraman & Felix Suntheim, 2022. "Swing Pricing and Fragility in Open-End Mutual Funds," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 35(1), pages 1-50.
    12. Yang Song, 2020. "The Mismatch Between Mutual Fund Scale and Skill," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 75(5), pages 2555-2589, October.
    13. Li, Zhiyong & Rao, Xiao, 2023. "Exploring the zoo of predictors for mutual fund performance in China," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    14. Martin Rohleder & Dominik Schulte & Marco Wilkens, 2017. "Management of flow risk in mutual funds," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 48(1), pages 31-56, January.
    15. Pástor, Ľuboš & Stambaugh, Robert F. & Taylor, Lucian A., 2015. "Scale and skill in active management," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(1), pages 23-45.
    16. Choi, Jaewon & Hoseinzade, Saeid & Shin, Sean Seunghun & Tehranian, Hassan, 2020. "Corporate bond mutual funds and asset fire sales," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(2), pages 432-457.
    17. Mirza, Harun & Moccero, Diego & Palligkinis, Spyros & Pancaro, Cosimo, 2020. "Fire sales by euro area banks and funds: What is their asset price impact?," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 430-444.
    18. Milan Szabo, 2022. "Meeting investor outflows in Czech bond and equity funds: horizontal or vertical?," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 49(4), pages 1123-1151, November.
    19. Dasgupta, Amil & Choi, Jaewon & Oh, Ji Yeol Jimmy, 2019. "Bond Funds and Credit Risk," CEPR Discussion Papers 14134, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    20. Pástor, Ľuboš & Stambaugh, Robert F. & Taylor, Lucian A., 2015. "Scale and skill in active management," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(1), pages 23-45.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    long-short equity mutual funds; cash holdings; portfolio beta; fund performance; flow-performance relations;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G00 - Financial Economics - - General - - - General

    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:ehl:lserod:118854. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.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.