Fund managers' bias toward geographically proximate securities is a well-researched phenomenon, yet the origins of managers' location choices have received little empirical scrutiny. This paper traces the employment and geographic heritage of 358 entrepreneurial fund managers and analyzes the determinants of where they locate their firms and stock selections. The evidence suggests that start-ups tend to be based close to the origins of their founders and in regions with more investment management firms, banking establishments, and large institutional money managers. New money managers show a strong local bias in their equity holdings, three times the levels previously documented for mutual funds. The propensity to invest closer to home correlates strongly with the presence of sub-advisory opportunities from institutional investors in the vicinity. While home bias levels between managers who relocate with their start-ups and the rest of the entrepreneurs are similar, preferences for stocks that were formally local persist.

Theory predicts that capping brokers’ compensation exacerbates the exploitation of retail investors. We show that regulated caps on mutual fund 12b-1 fees, effectively sales commissions, are associated with negative equity fund performance, but only after a structural shift toward maximum permitted levels of the fees around 2000. Past this break point, flow–performance sensitivity shifts from the middle- to the highest-performing funds, suggesting that the fee cap increases performance-chasing behavior by constraining brokers’ incentives to learn about lower-ranked funds. The policy implication is that regulators must reevaluate the efficacy of caps on brokerage fees.