Media and Investment Management

Abstract

This paper studies the relation between the media coverage of funds and their future performance. We classify news items about equity hedge funds over 1999--2008 into three source groups: General newspapers, Specialized magazines, and Corporate Communication. Examining post-exclusive-coverage performance, we document that Corporate-covered funds outperform and General-covered funds underperform, with a performance difference of about 11% annually. Applying a textual analysis to news items, we find that sentiment-related biases do not explain the inter-source return spread. Nevertheless, investor fund flow does not differentially respond to source-based information. The results suggest that the source-based return spread may reflect the extensive costs of processing information across thousands of media sources to generate alpha.

Keywords: Media coverage, Hedge funds, Financial information, Asset pricing

JEL Classification: D80, G14, G20