Investor Behavior in the Mutual Fund Industry: Evidence from Gross Flows

Using a large sample of monthly gross flows from 1997 to 2003, we uncover several previously undocumented regularities in investor behavior. First, investor purchases and sales produce fund-level gross flows that are highly persistent. Persistence in fund flows dominates performance as a predictor of future fund flows. More importantly, failing to account for flow persistence leads to incorrect inferences with respect to the relation between performance and flows. Second, we document that investors react differently to performance depending on the type of fund, and that investor trading activity produces meaningful differences in the persistence of fund flows across mutual fund types. Third, at least some investors appear to evaluate and respond to mutual fund performance over much shorter time spans than previously assessed. Additionally, we document differences in the speed and magnitude of investors’ purchase and sales responses to performance

Investors Do Respond to Poor Mutual Fund Performance: Evidence from Inflows and Outflows

Abstract We examine the relation between mutual fund performance and gross flows for a large sample of actively managed U.S. mutual funds. Unlike previous studies that have only examined periods of generally increasing net flows, our sample includes periods of both increasing and decreasing net flows. We find that outflows are related to performance, with investors withdrawing money from poor performers. We also find that outflows and inflows respond asymmetrically to performance, outflows increase more aggressively following poor performance, and inflows increase more aggressively following good performance. Additionally, we find a symmetric performance net flow relation

Generalized Opinion Dynamics from Local Optimization Rules

We study generalizations of the Hegselmann-Krause (HK) model for opinion dynamics, incorporating features and parameters that are natural components of observed social systems. The first generalization is one where the strength of influence depends on the distance of the agents' opinions. Under this setup, we identify conditions under which the opinions converge in finite time, and provide a qualitative characterization of the equilibrium. We interpret the HK model opinion update rule as a quadratic cost-minimization rule. This enables a second generalization: a family of update rules which possess different equilibrium properties. Subsequently, we investigate models in which a external force can behave strategically to modulate/influence user updates. We consider cases where this external force can introduce additional agents and cases where they can modify the cost structures for other agents. We describe and analyze some strategies through which such modulation may be possible in an order-optimal manner. Our simulations demonstrate that generalized dynamics differ qualitatively and quantitatively from traditional HK dynamics.Comment: 20 pages, under revie

Photometric study of an Eclipsing Binary in Praesepe

We present CCD photometric observations of an eclipsing binary in the direction of the open cluster Praesepe using the 2 m telescope of IUCAA Girawali Observatory, India. Though the system was classified as an eclipsing binary by Pepper et al.(2008),detail investigations were lacking. The photometric solutions using the Wilson-Devinney code suggest that it is a W-type W UMa system and interestingly, the system parameters were similar to another contact binary system SW Lac.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

An Opportunistic-Non Orthogonal Multiple Access based Cooperative Relaying system over Rician Fading Channels

Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has become a salient technology for improving the spectral efficiency of the next generation 5G wireless communication networks. In this paper, the achievable average rate of an Opportunistic Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (O-NOMA) based Cooperative Relaying System (CRS) is studied under Rician fading channels with Channel State Information (CSI) available at the source terminal. Based on CSI, for opportunistic transmission, the source immediately chooses either the direct transmission or the cooperative NOMA transmission using the relay, which can provide better achievable average rate performance than the existing Conventional-NOMA (C-NOMA) based CRS with no CSI at the source node. Furthermore, a mathematical expression is also derived for the achievable average rate and the results are compared with C-NOMA based CRS with no CSI at the transmitter end, over a range of increasing power allocation coefficients, transmit Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs) and average channel powers. Numerical results show that the CRS using O-NOMA with CSI achieves better spectral efficiency in terms of the achievable average rate than the Conventional-NOMA based CRS without CSI. To check the consistency of the derived analytical results, Monte Carlo simulations are performed which verify that the results are consistent and matched well with the simulation results.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1709.0822