Despite their mediocre mean performance, actively managed mutual funds are distinct from passive funds in their return distributions. Active value funds better hedge downside risk, while active growth funds better capture upside potential. Since such performance features may appeal to investors with tail‐overweighting preferences, we show that preferences for downside protection and upside potential estimated from the empirical pricing kernel can help explain active fund flows in the value and growth categories, respectively. This effect of investor risk preferences varies significantly with funds' downside‐hedging and upside‐capturing ability, with levels of active management, and across retirement and retail funds.

Using institutional equity trading data, we find that a set of small institutional investors consistently follow credit ratings issued by an investor-paid rating agency in their trading decisions. Although rating information is credit related, we find that these followers often respond more strongly to investor-paid ratings than to influential trading signals, such as earnings announcements, analysts' earnings forecast revisions, and recommendation changes. Followers outperform non-followers, and show improved trading performance after becoming followers. We conclude that investor-paid rating agencies offer small institutional investors a cost-effective alternative to in-house research.