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A Better Measure of Institutional Informed Trading
Author(s) -
Guo Hui,
Qiu Buhui
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
contemporary accounting research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.769
H-Index - 99
eISSN - 1911-3846
pISSN - 0823-9150
DOI - 10.1111/1911-3846.12160
Subject(s) - herding , institutional investor , extant taxon , stock (firearms) , trading strategy , private information retrieval , financial economics , business , earnings , insider trading , empirical research , predictive power , accounting , monetary economics , economics , finance , corporate governance , computer science , mechanical engineering , philosophy , computer security , engineering , epistemology , evolutionary biology , forestry , biology , geography
Although many studies show that the presence of institutional investors facilitates the incorporation of accounting information into financial markets, the evidence of informed trading by institutions is rather limited in the extant literature. We address these inconsistent findings by proposing PC _ NII , percentage changes in the number of a stock's institutional investors, as a novel informed trading measure. PC _ NII is better able to detect informed trading than are changes in institutional ownership ( Δ IO )—the measure commonly used in previous studies—because (i) entries and exits are usually triggered by substantive private information and (ii) only a small fraction of institutions have superior information. As conjectured, PC _ NII subsumes the information content of Δ IO and other institutional trading and herding measures in the forecast of stock returns, and its strong predictive power for stock returns reflects mainly its close correlation with future earnings surprises. We also show that PC _ NII helps address empirical issues that require a reliable measure of institutional informed trading.