Who are the momentum chasers? New evidence from mutual funds in China

Regarding the effect of past returns on the trading behaviour of individual investors, earlier studies focused on stocks, and we employ unique account-level data from 2005 to 2011 to analyse this effect in mutual funds. After considering both market, fund and personal characteristics, we find that mutual funds investors are momentum chasers. Furthermore, we find that the group of largest size individuals tends to behave like institutions, and do not chase near-term price performance. Finally, we discuss this behavioural difference between the fund and stock investors from the perspective of bounded rationality. Those results show that most individual investors in China's fund market are not rational and prefer to chase funds with rising prices.