Institutional Trading Behavior Research Articles

The state-dependent trading behavior of banks in the oil futures market

We study the state-dependent trading behavior of financial institutions in the oil futures market, using structural vector autoregressions with Markov switching in heteroskedasticity. We consider two states of the world: tranquil and turbulent. We decompose the observable time-varying price volatility during the period 2006M6–2016M5 into changes in the slopes of traders’ demand curves and into changes in the variability of their demand shocks. We find that the downward-sloping demand curve of intermediaries steepens significantly during crises times and that the variance of their demand shocks doubles. These findings suggest that the futures pricing of financial institutions is highly nonlinear and raises the hedging costs of producers and consumers of oil when volatility is high.

How Do Institutional Investors Trade

Using a novel and detailed custody trades dataset, this paper analyzes the trading behavior of institutions. Extant studies have examined the effects of past performance on trading by retail investors, day traders, and futures floor traders. Yet very little work has been done on institutions. We find that unlike other investors, institutions take on more risk following an increase in net profit and loss. However, the responses to a gain and loss are highly asymmetric. Institutions aggressively reduce risk in the wake of losses, but only mildly increase risk in the wake of gains. This asymmetry is more pronounced for experienced and older funds. Further, the performance dependence varies over the calendar year, and manifests itself at the security but not at the portfolio level. We relate these findings to the behavioral theories of narrow framing, dynamic loss aversion, and overconfidence.

The Systemic Effects of Benchmarking

We show that the competitive pressure to beat a benchmark may induce institutional trading behavior that exposes retail investors to tail risk. In our model, institutional investors are different from a retail investor because they derive higher utility when their benchmark outperforms. This forces institutional investors to take on leverage to overinvest in the benchmark. Institutional investors execute fire sales when the benchmark experiences shock. This behavior increases market volatility, raising the tail risk exposure of the retail investor. Ex post, tail risk is only short lived. All investors survive in the long run under standard conditions, and the most patient investor dominates. Ex ante, however, benchmarking is welfare reducing for the retail investor, and beneficial only to the impatient institutional investor.

Foreign institutional investor trading in Chinese A-share markets

Purpose – This paper addresses the topic “The interaction between financial institutions and firms in the nonfinancial sectors” in the special issue of “Banking and finance in China.” The purpose of this paper is to examine the trading behavior and price effects of foreign institutions under the celebrated Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) scheme on all non-financial firms in the Chinese A-share markets. Design/methodology/approach – Using quarterly equity-level foreign institution transactions from 2005Q1 to 2011Q4 in the Chinese A-share market, the author finds a positive and significant contemporaneous relationship between foreign flows and equity returns. For each quarter, the author sorts the stocks into ten portfolios based on the percentage of foreign flows, and employs the bivariate vector autoregression (VAR) model to examine the contemporaneous association in detail. Findings – Foreign institutions in the Chinese A-share markets do not show positive or negative feedback trading; however, their flows have a strong impact on future equity returns because of informational advantage. Additionally, different associations are found between foreign flows and equity returns. Research limitations/implications – Constraints on data availability exist, and a quarterly dimension is too coarse to provide a statistically precise result, although certain related papers use quarterly dimension data. Further research is required using higher frequency data. Originality/value – This paper provides a first look at foreign institution trading patterns and price effects on local equity returns in the Chinese A-share markets. Additionally, the equity level data allow the author to exclude the stocks that were not bought by foreign institutions and to detect the “pure effect” of foreign flows on equity returns.

An Investigation into Sentiment-Induced Institutional Trading Behavior and Asset Pricing in the REIT Market

Institutional investors such as pension funds or insurance companies commonly invest in the unsecuritized and securitized real estate market. We investigate how institutional investor sentiment in the commercial real estate market affects institutional trading behavior in the REIT market and subsequently asset pricing. In particular, we test two alternative theories - flight to liquidity and style investing theory - to explain the sentiment-induced trading behavior of institutional investors in the REIT market for the pre-crisis (2002–2006), crisis (2007–2009) and post-crisis (2010–2012) period. We find that the applicability of either theory depends on economic conditions. In the pre-crisis period institutional investors switched capital in and out of REITs based on their sentiment in the private market (style investing). However, in the crisis period institutional investors switched capital from the illiquid private market to the more liquid REIT market (flight to liquidity). The flight to more liquid REITs continued into the post-crisis to a lesser extent and suggests that the financial crisis has changed institutional investment behavior. Our findings hold across different groups of REITs (e.g. high and low institutional ownership, S&P and non-S&P REITs) and property types. We also find that institutional real estate investor sentiment introduces a non-fundamental component into REIT pricing.

Institutional trading and attention bias

Share repurchase announcements with higher turnover ratio attract more attention from institutions than events with lower turnover ratio. The stock price behavior is associated with the institutional trading behavior around share repurchase announcements. The higher exposure to the attention bias, the worse the post-trade performance the institution earns. Because of the agency problem and lack of sophistication, domestic mutual funds suffer from attention bias in Taiwan.

The Impact of Political Uncertainty and Abnormal Market Conditions on Institutional Trading Behavior

The Impact of Political Uncertainty and Abnormal Market Conditions on Institutional Trading Behavior

The Impact of Political Uncertainty and Abnormal Market Conditions on Institutional Trading Behavior

This article investigates the impact of political uncertainty and abnormal market conditions on institutional trading behavior. The study finds that institutional investors are net buyers during abnormal market decreases and net sellers during abnormal market increases. Institutional investors’ net buying activity declines because of aversion to political uncertainty. Institutional investors face high price impact during times of high political uncertainty and abnormal market conditions. In abnormal market declines, institutional sells face a 2.98% price impact. In abnormal market increases, institutional buys generate a price impact of 3.24%. This study also finds that high political uncertainty increases price impact during abnormal market declines by up to 0.10%. <b>TOPICS:</b>Tail risks, analysis of individual factors/risk premia, financial crises and financial market history

How Do Institutional Investors Trade When Firms are Buying Back Shares?

We study how institutional investors trade when firms buy back shares. We find that aggregate institutional ownership decline following share repurchase announcements. While some institutions sell shares passively to meet the firm demand for the market to clear, the overall institutional sell-off only accounts for 27% of shares bought back contemporaneously by firms. Many firms experience a net inflow of institutional investment. The decrease in institutional shareholding is greater in firms that experience weaker recent stock performance, display more information uncertainty, have higher institutional ownership, and conduct ill-timed/motivated repurchases that are not endorsed by institutions. And most of the sell-off comes from institutions active in trading. Institutional buying is more informative of the future returns than institutional sell-off, especially in firms with greater information asymmetry. But this return predictability decays over time. Our findings have important implications for firms’ cash payout policy and shed light on institutional trading behavior around voluntary corporate events.

Institutional Trading Behavior in the ETF Market

We examine the trading behavior of institutional investors in the Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) market from 1993 to 2007. We concentrate on the relation between cross-sectional institutional ETF ownership and returns, particularly on the relation between changes in ownership and future returns, between past returns and institutional ownership, and between changes in ownership across institution classes (i.e. herding). Our results do not show evidence of a significant relation between changes in institutional ownership and future ETF returns. However, consistent with the use of negative feedback investment strategies, institutional investors tend to exhibit excess demands for past losers, especially in sector and international ETFs. They also exhibit high degrees of herding behavior, with banks driving the bulk of these results. Furthermore, their herding behavior is influenced by their experience in the ETF market and by certain ETF characteristics, such as liquidity and size, suggesting an aversion for information uncertainty leads them to herd.

Trading Behavior, Performance, and Stock Preference of Foreigners, Local Institutions, and Individual Investors: Evidence from the Korean Stock Market*

AbstractWe examine the trading behavior and performance of foreigners, local institutions, and individual investors in the Korean stock market. The key research issue is whether the commonly‐documented information disadvantage of foreign investors translates into their underperformance relative to local institutional and individual investors. Our results show the opposite, that the stocks foreigners buy significantly outperform the stocks they sell in terms of both stock returns and operating profitability, leading to the significant outperformance of foreigners’ trading strategies over those of local investors. Our results provide strong evidence that the superior performance of foreigners is attributed to their ability to discern between company stocks with good versus bad, at least short‐term, prospects. Our findings on the trading behavior of investors in the Korean market are, in general, consistent with those for other markets documented in the published literature. Foreigners behave like short‐term momentum traders pursuing a growth strategy. Local institutions also trade like momentum traders but tend to buy value stocks. In contrast, individual investors trade like contrarians who buy past losers and sell past winners. Our findings show that foreigners prefer large‐cap stocks with high dividends. In sharp contrast, individual investors have a strong preference for small‐cap, high‐leverage, low dividend paying stocks, whereas local institutions tend to buy small‐cap, low leveraged stocks.

Institutional investors, intangible information, and the book-to-market effect

This paper establishes a robust link between the trading behavior of institutions and the book-to-market effect. Building on work by Daniel and Titman (2006), who argue that the book-to-market effect is driven by the reversal of intangible returns, I find that institutions tend to buy (sell) shares in response to positive (negative) intangible information and that the reversal of the intangible return is most pronounced among stocks for which a large proportion of active institutions trade in the direction of intangible information. Furthermore, the book-to-market effect is large and significant in stocks with intense past institutional trading but nonexistent in stocks with moderate institutional trading. This influence of institutional trading on the book-to-market effect is distinct from that of firm size. These results are consistent with the view that the tendency of institutions to trade in the direction of intangible information exacerbates price overreaction, thereby contributing to the value premium.

Caught on tape: Institutional trading, stock returns, and earnings announcements

Many questions about institutional trading can only be answered if one tracks high-frequency changes in institutional ownership. In the United States, however, institutions are only required to report their ownership quarterly in 13-F filings. We infer daily institutional trading behavior from the “tape”, the Transactions and Quotes database of the New York Stock Exchange, using a sophisticated method that best predicts quarterly 13-F data from trades of different sizes. We find that daily institutional trades are highly persistent and respond positively to recent daily returns but negatively to longer-term past daily returns. Institutional trades, particularly sells, appear to generate short-term losses—possibly reflecting institutional demand for liquidity—but longer-term profits. One source of these profits is that institutions anticipate both earnings surprises and post-earnings announcement drift. These results are different from those obtained using a standard size cutoff rule for institutional trades.

The Effect of Regulation FD on Transient Institutional Investors' Trading Behavior

ABSTRACTWe assess the impact of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) on the trading behavior of transient institutional investors in the quarter prior to a bad news break in a string of consecutive earnings increases. Bad news breaks are defined as breaks that are by growth firms, preceded by longer strings of consecutive earnings increases, followed by longer strings of consecutive earnings decreases, and associated with larger declines in earnings. Pre–Reg FD transient institutions have abnormal selling of stocks in the quarter immediately preceding a bad news break. This abnormal selling is confined to firms that hold conference calls in the pre–Reg FD period. However, in the post–Reg FD period transient institutions do not exhibit similar abnormal selling of stocks in the quarter before a bad news break. Furthermore, after Reg FD transient institutions allocate less of their stock portfolios to conference call firms relative to non–conference call firms in the quarters prior to a bad news break. These results demonstrate that Reg FD has had an impact on management's selective disclosure behavior and significantly changed the trading behavior of transient institutions.

The Effect of Regulation Fd on Transient Institutional Investors' Trading Behavior

We assess the impact of Reg FD on the trading behavior of transient institutional investors in the quarter prior to a bad news break in a string of consecutive earnings increases. Bad news breaks are defined as breaks that are by growth firms, preceded by longer strings of consecutive earnings increases, followed by longer strings of consecutive earnings decreases, and associated with larger declines in earnings. Pre Reg FD transient institutions have abnormal selling of stocks in the quarter immediately preceding a bad news break. This abnormal selling is confined to firms that held conference calls in the pre Reg FD period. However, in the post Reg FD period transient institutions do not exhibit similar abnormal selling of stocks in the quarter before a bad news break. Furthermore, after Reg FD transient institutions allocate less of their stock portfolios to conference call firms relative to non-conference call firms in the quarters prior to a bad news break. These results demonstrate that Reg FD has had an impact on management's selective disclosure behavior and significantly changed the trading behavior of transient institutions.

Caught on Tape: Institutional Trading, Stock Returns, and Earnings Announcements

Many questions about institutional trading can only be answered if one can track high-frequency changes in institutional ownership. In the U.S., however, institutions are only required to report their ownership quarterly in 13-F filings. We infer daily institutional trading behavior from the tape, the Transactions and Quotes database of the New York Stock Exchange, using a sophisticated method that best matches quarterly 13-F data. We find that daily institutional trades are highly persistent and respond positively to recent daily returns but negatively to longer-term past daily returns. Institutional trades, particularly sells, appear to generate short-term losses - possibly reflecting institutional demand for liquidity - but longer-term profits. One source of these profits is that institutions anticipate both earnings surprises and post-earnings-announcement drift. These results are different from those obtained using a standard size cutoff rule for institutional trades.

Institutional Investors, Intangible Information and the Book-to-Market Effect

This paper establishes a robust link between the trading behavior of institutions and the book-to-market effect. Building on work by Daniel and Titman (2006), who argue that the book-to-market effect is driven by the reversal of intangible returns, I find that institutions tend to buy (sell) shares in response to positive (negative) intangible information and that the reversal of the intangible return is most pronounced among stocks for which a large proportion of active institutions trade in the direction of intangible information. Furthermore, the book-to-market effect is large and significant in stocks with intense past institutional trading but nonexistent in stocks with moderate institutional trading. This influence of institutional trading on the book-to-market effect is distinct from that of firm size. These results are consistent with the view that the tendency of institutions to trade in the direction of intangible information exacerbates price overreaction, thereby contributing to the value premium.

The trading behavior of institutions and individuals in Chinese equity markets

This paper employs a unique data set to analyze the trading behavior of 4.74 million individual and institutional investors across Mainland China. Results show that groups of individual investors with varying trade values (as proxies for wealth levels) engage in different trading strategies. Chinese institutions are momentum investors, while less wealthy Chinese individual investors at large are contrarian investors. The results also indicate that a small group of wealthiest Chinese individuals tend to behave like institutions when they buy stocks, and behave like less wealthy individuals when they sell. Furthermore, only the trading activities of institutions and of wealthiest individuals can affect future stock volatility, but those of Chinese individual investors at large have no predictive power for future stock returns.

Trading Intensity, Institutional Ownership and Institutional Investorsf Trading Behavior

This paper explores the effects of institutional investorsf trading intensity and stockfs institutional ownership on the institutional trading behavior. Specifically, this paper attempts to examine whether institutional investorsf momentum behavior will be affected by their trading intensity and the institutional ownership of their stockholdings. Empirical results show that institutional investors tend to exhibit momentum trading behavior when they are buying stocks. However, they tend to be feedback traders while they are selling stocks. This, thus, results in an asymmetric momentum (feedback) trading behavior. This phenomenon is more pronounced for the mutual fund managers. Furthermore, we also find that stockfs institutional ownership also plays an important role affecting institutional investorsf momentum trading behavior. In specific, institutional investors tend to exhibit more significant momentum (feedback) trading behavior on stocks with higher (lower) institutional ownership. This asymmetric trading behavior still exists after controlling factors such as firm size and mutual fundsf types. This, in turn, indicates that the above finding regarding institutional investorsf asymmetric trading behavior does not result from either firm size or particular institutional investor type. Key words: institutional investors, trading intensity, momentum trading, feedback trading

Institutional Investors' Trading Behavior in Mergers and Acquisitions

Abstract We investigate institutional investors’ trading behavior of acquiring firm stocks surrounding merger activities for the period 1992–2001. We label investment companies and independent investment advisors as active institutions and banks, nonbank trusts, and insurance companies as passive institutions. We analyze the trading behavior of active and passive institutions surrounding merger announcements and their eventual resolution. Our results indicate that active institutions significantly increase their holdings of acquiring firm stocks for mergers with higher announcement period abnormal return and this increase is more pronounced for stock mergers than cash mergers. Active institutions display preference for stock proposals at the merger announcement on the basis of their prior beliefs and this is explained by the “overreaction phenomenon.” However, they update their beliefs between announcement and final resolution as more information arrives into the market. Finally, active institutions appear to correct their overreaction behavior by displaying their greater preference for cash proposals as compared to stock proposals at the quarter of eventual outcome. The trading behavior of passive institutions suggests that these institutions disregard the market response of merger announcement in trading acquiring firm stocks at the announcement quarter. The passive institutions gradually update their beliefs and utilize the information released at the announcement in rebalancing their portfolios at the final resolution.