The hedge fund literature has already shown that hedge funds and mutual funds follow a different strategy. One result of the literature was that mutual funds herd into or out of stocks following the herd of hedge funds one quarter later. The aim of this paper is to find out whether herding behavior of mutual funds have changed after the financial crisis. Our paper compares mutual funds and equity hedge funds in general (not only large hedge funds). The hypothesis is that mutual funds are not herding to equity hedge funds as strong as before the crisis. We use OLS regressions and correlation analysis to test the aforementioned hypothesis. We found that the monthly returns of hedge funds and mutual funds have synchronized in developed markets after the financial crisis. Therefore, the argument that mutual funds herd hedge funds is at least not as strong as before. The improving effectiveness and price informativeness could be an explanation for this changing environment.
During the last decades, institutional investors gained an ever more important position as managers of assets and owners of corporations. By demanding (short-term) shareholder value, some of them have driven the financialization of corporations and of the financial sector itself. This chapter first characterizes the specific roles that private equity funds, hedge funds, and mutual funds have played in this development. It then moves on to focus on one group of institutional investors that is rapidly becoming a pivotal factor for corporate control in many countries – the “Big Three” large passive asset managers BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.
Relationship between mutual funds and hedge funds performance in different periods