Are portfolio managers skilled or do they trade too much? Using a marked-to-market based “fair-value” method for measuring fund manager skill, we find that institutional managers can potentially earn +42 (+33) basis points benchmark-adjusted return before transaction costs after a holding period of four weeks on their buy (sell) trades. After transaction costs, the benchmark-adjusted return for the buy (sell) trades is +1 (-8) basis points. Pension fund managers outperform money managers. We are unable to detect evidence for overconfidence among pension fund managers over this short-horizon. In addition, we are unable to find evidence of disposition effect among mutual fund managers. Institutions tend to engage in short-term trades with holding period of four weeks (or less) despite only breaking-even or making economically insignificant (modest) benchmark-adjusted losses after round-trip transaction costs for liquidity, risk-management, or tax-minimization reasons. Among these, evidence for liquidity trading motive is the strongest.

We read all news items that came out between 1996 and 2000 on 458 Internet initial public offerings (IPOs) and a matching sample of 458 non-Internet IPOs (a total of 171,488 news items) and classify each news item as good news, neutral news, or bad news. We first document that the media were more positive for Internet IPOs in the period of the dramatic rise in share prices and more negative for Internet IPOs in the period of the dramatic fall in share prices. We then document that media hype is unable to explain the Internet bubble: A 1,646% difference exists in returns between Internet stocks and non-Internet stocks from January 1, 1997, through March 24, 2000 (the market peak), and the media can explain only 2.9% of that.