The Finance Brown Bag Seminar is held by the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance (WU Vienna) and the Vienna Graduate School of Finance (VGSF). It serves as a presentation platform for PhD students, faculty members, and visitors. An overview of BBS on the website of the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance.
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Merlin Bartel, University of Liechtenstein
Factor Chasing: How fast is International Capital?
(joint with Pedro Barroso and Sebastian Stöckl)
We show that under global market frictions even highly specialized style mutual funds underreact to publicly available information. We first establish a distinctive pattern in international risk factor returns that we term “Factor Chasing“. A factor performing better in a country than in others tends to continue outperforming in the following months. Strategies that chase single factor returns over the world yield highly positive returns that are not spanned by leading factor models. Considering the frequently documented positive feedback trading tendency of managers, factor chasing should be highly attractive to specialized style mutual funds. We confirm that managers trade on the signal, but with a considerable delay. Global specialized style mutual funds fail to time trades on simple long-only chasing strategies. We further show that even highly specialized fund managers are subject to commonly reported biases.
