In this article, we use a unique dataset to shed new light on the issue of whether domestic investors have an edge over foreign investors in trading domestic stocks by investigating whether foreigners pay more for stocks when they buy and receive less...
In this article, we use a unique dataset to shed new light on the issue of whether domestic investors have an edge over foreign investors in trading domestic stocks by investigating whether foreigners pay more for stocks when they buy and receive less when they sell. One advantage of such an investigation is that it relies less on models of expected returns than existing articles that compare the performance of foreign investors to the performance of domestic investors. Using a data set of all trades on the Korean stock exchange from December 2, 1996 to November 30, 1998, we find evidence that foreign investors are at a disadvantage for medium and large trades but not for small trades. Weighting trades by their size, the average disadvantage of foreign money managers relative to domestic money managers is of the order of 21 basis points for purchases and 16 basis points for sales. This means that on a roundtrip trade foreign money managers face greater transaction costs of the order of 37 basis points compared to domestic money managers, which is substantial for any foreign investor who is not a long-term buy-and-hold investor. For instance, an investor who trades three times per year would contemplate a drag on his performance in excess of 100 basis points. To put this in perspective, Carhart (1997) reports that the difference in the monthly estimates of Jensen's alpha between the top decile and the bottom decile of diversified mutual funds in the U.S. is 0.67% from 1963 through 1993. The roundtrip edge could therefore have a substantial impact on the performance of a money manager. We also find that foreign money managers are at a disadvantage compared to domestic individuals, but this evidence is stronger for sales than for purchases.
We find that the disadvantage of foreign investors cannot be explained by firm and stock characteristics. It is strongly related to the size of the trades of foreign investors and to how intensely they trade. There are at least three non-mutually exclusive explanations for this result. First, foreign investors could be more impatient or trade when liquidity is lower, so that they pay more to liquidity providers. Second, foreign investors are better informed, so that their trades have a larger permanent impact. Third, they make their trades after prices have already moved against them. To assess these three possible explanations, we investigate stock returns before, during, and after periods of intensive trading. We find that the intensive trading by foreign investors is not associated with a greater temporary impact than the intensive trading by domestic institutions, suggesting that foreign investors are not more impatient in their trading than domestic institutions. Using a conventional measure of the permanent impact of intensive trading, there is no evidence either that foreign investors are better informed than domestic institutions. The key difference between foreign investors and domestic investors is that prices move more unfavorably for foreign investors than for domestic investors immediately before they trade intensively. This difference is partly explained by the return-chasing behavior of foreign investors.