Mutual Fund Trading and Portfolio Disclosures

This is the first study in a large European market which analyzes monthly portfolios to obtain evidence of equity fund trading around quarterly reports. A new portfolio-weight approach shows that managers disclose large-cap and well-known stocks with higher returns and hide the same return-loser stocks in the reporting months. A fund-size agency problem plays an important role in this window dressing evidence. Fund trading also shows that managers benefits from the January effect by buying small-cap stocks at the beginning of the year rather than causing this anomaly. © 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York.

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