The Dynamics of foreign portfolio inflows and equity returns in India

Abstract

The Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) have emerged as important players in the Indianequity market in the recent past. This paper makes an attempt to develop anunderstanding of the dynamics of the trading behavior of FIIs and returns in the Indianequity market by analyzing daily and monthly data. From our analysis we find that thereis strong evidence of FIIs chasing trends and adopting positive feedback trading strategiesat the aggregate level on a daily basis. However there is no evidence of positive feedbacktrading on a monthly basis. The results of our analysis also indicate that foreign investorshave a tendency to herd together in their trading activity in India. The trading behaviorand biases of the FIIs do not appear to have a destabilizing impact on the equity market