We study data from an organization in which fund managers privately share and discuss detailed investment recommendations. Buy recommendations generate positive abnormal returns, and sell recommendations result in negative abnormal returns. In the context of these results, we explore an important economic question: Why do skilled investors share profitable ideas with others? Evidence suggests that the managers in our sample share to receive feedback on their ideas and to attract additional arbitrageur capital to the securities they recommend in order to correct mispricings.

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We examine why buy-side analysts share investment ideas on SumZero.com, a private social networking website designed to facilitate interaction and information sharing among buy-side professionals. We first document that our sample of more than 1,000 buy-side analysts issue recommendations that have investment value. In particular, recommendations generate significant returns when they are posted to the website and the returns to both buy and sell recommendations drift in the direction of the recommendation. These returns are the most dramatic for contrarian recommendations (i.e., those issued contrary to the sell-side consensus). We explore labor-market motivations for sharing information and document that analysts who have strong incentives to seek new jobs (those at small funds), are significantly more likely to issue recommendations. We also show that analysts who share investment ideas are more likely to change jobs, and that the ratings their recommendations receive are positively related to changing employment. Overall, we show that social networking is an effective reputation building and job seeking tool for buy-side analysts.

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