In response to how they are compensated, mutual fund managers who are underperforming by mid-year are likely to increase the risk of their portfolios toward the year-end. We argue that an increase in the liquidity of the stocks that managers use to shift risk can lead to an increase in the size of their risky bets. This in turn hurts fund investors by increasing the costs of misaligned incentives associated with delegated portfolio management. We provide both theoretical and empirical results that are consistent with this argument. We use decimalization as an exogenous shock to liquidity to identify causal effects.

The internal markets of fund families can encourage member funds to deviate excessively from their investment mandates. Theoretically, we show that fund managers following sufficiently different style benchmarks can engage in risk-shifting by trading with one another at low cost inside their family. This benefits the managers and the family even in the absence of a family-level strategy. However, the excessive risks taken by the managers can be costly to fund investors. Empirically, we find support for the positive effect of intra-family style diversity on offsetting trades across funds and on deviations of funds’ portfolios from their benchmarks.