Mutual Fund Voluntary Portfolio Disclosure

Abstract

ABSTRACT A growing fraction of individual investors delegate their portfolio management to professional managers. As a result, the importance of transparency and investor protections have increased in financial markets. In Spain, management companies must report their mutual fund portfolios quarterly to investors. However, this information may be disclosed on a monthly basis to private information providers. In this study, we examine the influence of performance on voluntary portfolio disclosure from 2003 to 2013. The transparency and reporting strategies may differ from fund industries with different level of development, we will discuss the implications of the results for emerging markets. We find a positive significant relationship between the probability of fund portfolio disclosure and fund performance, and this effect is more significant when we consider risk-adjusted performance measures. The addition of some control variables in the model shows that the probability of the fund portfolio to be reported is positively related to fund age, management company size and fees and is negatively related to fund size.