Is Money Really 'Smart'? New Evidence on the Relation Between Mutual Fund Flows, Manager Behavior, and Performance Persistence

Mutual fund returns strongly persist over multi-year periods—that is the central finding of this paper. Further, consumer and fund manager behavior both play a large role in explaining these longterm continuation patterns—consumers invest heavily in last-year’s winning funds, and managers of these winners invest these inflows in momentum stocks to continue to outperform other funds for at least two years following the ranking year. By contrast, managers of losing funds appear reluctant to sell their losing stocks to finance the purchase of new momentum stocks, perhaps due to a disposition effect. Thus, momentum continues to separate winning from losing managers for a much longer period than indicated by prior studies. Even more surprising is that persistence in winning fund returns is not entirely explained by momentum—we find strong evidence that flow-related buying, especially among growth-oriented funds, pushes up stock prices. Specifically, stocks that winning funds purchase in response to persistent flows have returns that beat their size, book-to-market, and momentum benchmarks by two to three percent per year over a four-year period. Cross-sectional regressions indicate that these abnormal returns are strongly related to fund inflows, but not to the past performance of the funds—thus, casting some doubt on prior findings of persistent manager talent in picking stocks. Finally, at the style-adjusted net returns level, we find no persistence, consistent with the results of prior studies. On balance, we confirm that money is smart in chasing winning managers, but that a “copycat” strategy of mimicking winning fund stock trades to take advantage of flow-related returns appears to be the smartest strategy. Eighty-eight million individuals now hold investments in U.S. mutual funds, with over 90 percent of the value of these investments being held in actively managed funds. Further, actively managed equity funds gain the lion’s share of consumer inflows—flows of net new money to equity funds (inflows minus outflows) totalled $309 billion in 2000, pushing the aggregate value of investments held by these funds to almost $4 trillion at year-end 2000. While the majority of individual investors apparently believe in the virtues of active management in general, many appear to hold even stronger beliefs concerning the talents of subgroups of fund managers—they appear to believe that, among the field of active managers, superior managers exist that can “beat the market” for long periods of time. In particular,Morningstar and Lipper compete vigorously for the attention of these true believers by providing regular fund performance rankings, while popular publications such as Money Magazine routinely profile “star” mutual fund managers. In addition, investor dollars, while not very quick to abandon past losing funds, aggressively chase past winners (see, for example, Sirri and Tufano (1998)). Are these “performance-chasers” wasting their money and time, or is money “smart”? Several past papers have attempted to tackle this issue, with somewhat differing results. For example, Grinblatt and Titman (1989a, 1993) find that some mutual fund managers are able to consistently earn positive abnormal returns before fees and expenses, while Brown and Goetzmann (1995; BG) attribute persistence to inferior funds consistently earning negative abnormal returns. Gruber (1996) and Zheng (1999) examine persistence from the viewpoint of consumer money flows to funds, and find that money is “smart”—that is, money flows disproportionately to funds exhibiting superior future returns. However, the exact source of the smart money effect remains a puzzle—does smart money capture manager talent or, perhaps, simply momentum in stock returns? More recently, Carhart (1997) examines the persistence in net returns of U.S. mutual funds, controlling for the continuation attributable to priced equity styles (see, for example, Fama and French (1992, 1993, 1996), Jegadeesh and Titman (1993), Daniel and Titman (1997), andMoskowitz and Grinblatt (1999)). Carhart finds little evidence of superior funds that consistently outperform their style benchmarks—specifically, Carhart finds that funds in the highest net return decile (of the CRSP mutual fund database) during one year beat funds in the lowest decile by about 3.5 percent during the following year, almost all due to the one-year momentum effect documented Sapp and Tiwari (2002) find evidence that, at the net return level, the smart-money effect can be explained by momentum and not by manager talent, while Teo and Woo (2001) find evidence of a “dumb money” effect—that is, high inflow funds underperform low inflow funds over multi-year time periods.