Are large fund managers problematic?

Last month, I read four seemingly unrelated papers which all point towards problems posed by large fund managers.

1. Ben-David, Franzoni, Moussawi and Sedunov (The Granular Nature of Large Institutional Investors) show that the stocks owned by large institutions exhibit stronger price inefficiency and are also more volatile. They also study the impact of Blackrock’s acquisition of Barclays Global Investors (which the authors for some strange reason choose to identify only as “a mega-merger between two large institutional investors that took place at the end of 2009”). Post merger, the ownership of stocks which was spread across two fund managers became concentrated in one fund manager. The interaction term in their regression results show that this concentration increased the volatility of the stocks concerned. On the mispricing front, they show that the autocorrelation of returns is higher for stocks that are held by large institutional investors; and that stocks with common ownership by large institutions display abnormal co-movement. They also show that negative news about the fund manager (increase in the CDS spread) lead to an increase in volatility of stocks owned by that fund.

2. Israeli, Lee and Sridharan (Is There a Dark Side to Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)? An Information Perspective) find that stocks that are owned by Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) suffer a decline in pricing efficiency: higher trading costs (measured as bid-ask spreads and price impact of trades), higher co-movement with general market and industry returns; a decline in the predictive power of current returns for future earnings); and a decline in the number of analysts covering the firm. They hypothesize that ETF ownership reduces the supply of securities available for trade, as well as the number of uninformed traders willing to trade these securities. Much the same factors may be behind the results found by Ben-David, Franzoni, Moussawi and Sedunov.

3. Clare, Nitzsche and Motson (Are Investors Better Off with Small Hedge Funds in Times of Crisis?) argue that on average investors were better off investing with a small hedge fund instead of a large one in times of crisis (the dot com bust and the global financial crisis). They speculate that bigger hedge funds might attract more hot money (fund of funds) which might lead to large redemptions during crises. Smaller hedge funds might have less flighty investors and more stringent gating arrangements. Smaller hedge funds might also have lower beta portfolios.

4. Elhauge (Horizontal Shareholding as an Antitrust Violation) focuses on problems in the real economy rather than in the financial markets. The argument is that when a common set of large institutions own significant shares in firms that are horizontal competitors in a concentrated product market, these firms are likely to behave anticompetitively. Elhauge discusses the DuPont-Monsanta situation to illustrate his argument. The top four shareholders of DuPont are also four of the top five shareholders in Monsanto, and they own nearly 20% of both companies. The fifth largest shareholder of DuPont, the Trian Fund, which did not own significant shares in Monsanto, launched a proxy contest criticizing DuPont management for failing to maximize DuPont profits. In particular, Trian complained that DuPont entered into a reverse payment patent settlement with Monsanto whereby, instead of competing, DuPont paid Monsanto for a license to use Monsanto’s patent. Trian’s proxy contest failed because it was not supported by the four top shareholders of DuPont who stood to gain from maximizing the joint profits of DuPont and Monsanto. I thought it might be useful for the author to compare this situation with the cartelization promoted by the big investment banks in 19th century US or by the big banks in early 20th century Germany or Japan.

Posted at 4:50 pm IST on Thu, 8 Oct 2015         permanent link

Categories: mutual funds

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