Visible Hands: Professional Asset Managers’ Expectations and the Stock Market in China

Abstract We study how professional fund managers’ growth expectations affect their equity investments and the consequent effects on prices. Using novel data on China’s mutual fund managers’ growth expectations, we show that pessimistic managers decrease equity allocations and shift away from more cyclical stocks. We identify a statistically significant link between managers’ growth expectations and returns on the stocks that they hold and trade. We also find that an earnings-based measure of price informativeness is increasing in forecasting managers’ investment and forecast-consistent trading, implying that active fund managers in China help move stock prices closer to underlying fundamentals.