This article studies the impact of retail investors on stock liquidity during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in spring 2020. Retail trading exhibits a sharp increase, especially among stocks with high COVID-19–related media coverage. Retail trading attenuated the rise in illiquidity by roughly 40% but less so for high-media-attention stocks. Causality is addressed using the staggered implementation of the stay-at-home advisory across U.S. states. The results highlight that ample free time and access to financial markets facilitated by fintech innovations to trading platforms are significant determinants of retail-investor stock market participation.
This paper advances the proposition that share restrictions engender potential conflicts of interest between fund managers and investors. Fund flows predict future fund returns for share-restricted funds, especially among funds with low levels of governance and funds managing insiders’ wealth, providing managers incentive to trade in advance of their clients. Some direct evidence for such managerial action is presented, using proprietary data on managerial investment in their own funds. The evidence suggests that private information about a fund, not necessarily its holdings, may constitute material information, with implications for proper fund governance and disclosure policy concerning managerial actions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.