Norman Schürhoff is Professor of Finance at the Swiss Finance Institute. This post is based on an article authored by Professor Schürhoff; Terrence Hendershott, Professor of Finance at the University of California, Berkeley; and Dmitry Livdan, Associate Professor of Finance at the University of California, Berkeley.
Who is informed on the stock market? There are plenty of reasons to believe that institutional investors possess value-relevant information. Unlike retail investors, institutions often directly communicate with publicly traded firms as well as brokerage firms through their investment banking, lending, and asset management divisions. Most mutual funds and hedge funds employ buy-side analysts and enjoy better relationships with sell-side analysts. Their economies of scale allow institutions to monitor many sources of information. Last but not least, institutions employ professionals and technologies with superior information processing skills. Yet, the academic literature has struggled to identify the information channel in institutional trading. There is some evidence that institutional investors are informed, but studies examining institutional order flow around specific events provide mixed evidence.