Fund Manager Skill: Selling Matters More!

Abstract

We examine whether mutual fund managers have differential skill in the buy and sell domains.
Although they have characteristic-timing ability in aggregate, we show they exhibit asymmetric
ability when buying and selling. Our key finding is that fund managers with superior selling ability
are significantly better at buying stocks and, as a result, earn significantly higher aggregate returns.
However, fund managers who buy stocks successfully do not necessarily have parallel selling
skills, leading to lower returns overall. Thus, we provide strong evidence that selling skill is the
key determinant of overall mutual fund timing performance.

Keywords: Mutual Funds, Timing Ability, Trade Motivation, Investment Performance, Attention

JEL Classification: C15, G11