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Behavioural Biases of Mutual Fund Investor

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Journal of Financial Economics 102 (2011) 1–27

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Journal of Financial Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jfec

Behavioral biases of mutual fund investors$
Warren Bailey a,n, Alok Kumar b, David Ng c,d a Cornell University, Johnson Graduate School of Management, USA University of Miami, School of Business Administration, USA c Cornell University, USA d University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, USA b a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history: Received 19 October 2009 Received in revised form 6 July 2010 Accepted 9 July 2010 Available online 27 May 2011 JEL classification: G11 D03 D14 Keywords: Individual investors Mutual funds Trend chasing Behavioral biases Factor analysis

abstract
We examine the effect of behavioral biases on the mutual fund choices of a large sample of US discount brokerage investors using new measures of attention to news, tax awareness, and fund-level familiarity bias, in addition to behavioral and demographic characteristics of earlier studies. Behaviorally biased investors typically make poor decisions about fund style and expenses, trading frequency, and timing, resulting in poor performance. Furthermore, trend chasing appears related to behavioral biases, rather than to rationally inferring managerial skill from past performance. Factor analysis suggests that biased investors often conform to stereotypes that can be characterized as Gambler, Smart, Overconfident, Narrow Framer, and Mature. & 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Previous studies of behavioral biases in the investment decisions of individual investors focus on the selection of individual stocks. Odean (1998, 1999), Barber and Odean (2001), and other empirical studies show that the stockpicking decisions of individual investors exhibit a variety of behavioral biases. However, little

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