Individuals, in general, are poor investors. They pick underperforming securities, do not
properly diversify their risks, and hurt themselves further by excessive trading. Thus, an
overreaching consensus in academic literature is that a vast majority of individual investors
would be better off putting their money in an index fund.1
Poor investment decisions by individual investors are often blamed on their lack of financial
sophistication, defined as the ability to avoid making investment mistakes (Calvet, Campbell,
and Sodini, 2009). Indeed, sophistication has been related to higher stock market participation
(Mankiw and Zeldes, 1991, Halliassos and Bertaut, 1995, Vissing-Joergensen, 2003,
Christiansen, Schroter-Joense, and Rangvid, 2007, Grinblatt, Keloharju, and Linnainmaa,
2011a), broader portfolio diversification (Goetzman and Kumar, 2008, Calvet et al., 2007), better
performance (Seru, Shumway, and Stoffman, 2009, Grinblatt et al., 2011b), and lower behavioral
biases (Feng and Seasholes, 2005, Calvet et al., 2009).
Investors may avoid mistakes either by being smart or by having knowledge of financial
markets. While one does not preclude another, proxies, used in the literature to identify more
financially sophisticated investors, appear to be good at capturing investors’ general intelligence,
but do not seem to measure financial expertise well.2 Consider for, example, probably the most
popular proxy of sophistication – labor income. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
financial managers’ average yearly pay (roughly 115 thousand dollars) is well above the
population average; however, managers rank lower on annual compensation than lawyers,
architecture and engineering managers, and doctors.3 So while a higher level of intelligence is
strongly related to higher labor income (Taubman and Wales, 1974), it is difficult to argue that
lawyers and doctors have higher financial expertise than finance professionals. Similarly, trading
complex financial instruments, such as derivatives, does not indicate investor awareness about
the risk and return characteristics of the security (Bauer, Cosemans, and Eichholtz, 2008).4 These
suggest that existing measures of financial sophistication – and, henceforth, available evidence of
its effect on investment outcomes – relate more to the cognitive abilities of investors rather than
their knowledge of financial markets. This raises a natural question: does financial expertise
matter (beyond intelligence)?
We provide direct evidence on the effect of financial expertise on investment outcomes. We
identify a group of individual investors who have both the knowledge of finance and day-to-day
experience with financial markets: mutual fund managers. We compare their private investment
decisions to those made by less financially astute investors which are similar to managers along a
number of socio-economic characteristics and general intelligence. For a group of 84 mutual
fund (MF) managers in Sweden we observe their own portfolios as well as the portfolios of their
mutual funds and peer individual investors. In addition, we have information on their real estate,
total wealth, and personal characteristics.
We analyze overall portfolios of managers and their peers, but also acknowledge the fact that
managers may have superior access to information and/or analysis about certain companies
stemming from their workplace. We reason that if a security is held by the mutual fund run by
manager, he or she is more likely to have information advantage in this security. To control for
these information differences we split portfolios of managers into positions that are also held by
the mutual fund of the manager (MF-related) and those which are not (non-MF-related) and
investigate them separately.
We find that financial experts do not exhibit superior security picking ability in their own
portfolios. Private investments of fund managers perform on par with investments of investors
similar to them in terms of age, gender, education level, income, and wealth. Even more striking,
mutual funds managers’ investments perform worse than private investments of wealthiest 1% of
investors. Moreover, non-MF-related investments of managers significantly underperform their
MF-related investments. This suggests that a part of overall managerial performance should be
credited to access to fund’s resources.
Financial experts also do not appear to be better than peers at diversifying risks. Managers
invest a larger percentage of their wealth in mutual funds, but hold a similar number of
individual stocks and exhibit similar levels of portfolio concentration. As a result, the Sharpe
ratios of their investments are similar to those of peers.
Additionally, we find little evidence that financial experts are less affected by behavioral
biases. There is weak evidence that managers exhibit a lower – in fact, negative – disposition
effect. However, this is observed only in MF-related positions. On the other hand, managers turn
over their portfolios as often as peers.
Interestingly, financial experts seem to be aware of limitations to their investment abilities.
Underperforming managers, especially more experienced ones, subsequently increase their
allocations to MF-related positions. A one standard deviation lower past-year portfolio return is
related to an 8.4% (or 37.7% relative to unconditional mean) higher probability of having a
position in MF-related stocks and a 9.1% (or 124.6% relative to the sample mean) larger share of
MF-related positions in the total value of the portfolio in a subsequent year. Still, only about 22%
of managers in our sample hold any position that is also held by their mutual fund.
Our results can be best summarized in the following way: day-to-day knowledge of financial
markets is of little value for investors with a high level of general intelligence – both managers
and their peers are among the most educated and wealthy investors. It is plausible that marginal
effect of financial expertise on investment decisions is trivial for these investors, but is of larger
importance for less sophisticated individuals.5 Our results, nevertheless, provide important
insights as they demonstrate that there are limits to the value added by financial expertise.
We make several contributions. First, we contribute to the literature on individual investor
decisions. Investor sophistication has been linked to better investment outcomes. The role of
financial knowledge so far has been underexplored. Our results demonstrate that for highly
sophisticated investors, expertise in finance does not improve investment decisions.
Second, our results help to explain the stylized fact that many high net worth individuals do
not seek the services of investment advisers, but instead prefer to invest on their own.6 Wealthy
investors appear to be as good investors as professional asset managers. Low value added by
investment advice for wealthy investors does not seem to justify the fees.
little or no personalization and high management fees. Put it differently, delegating management
of portfolios of this size makes little economic sense. Anecdotal evidence also points to peers
bearing responsibility for managing their own portfolios.
Fourth, it is also plausible that managers and their peers, being among the most affluent
people in the country, interact with each other and, as a result, make similar investment
decisions. Indeed, growing literature on peer effects (e.g. Hong, Kubik, and Stein, 2004, Brown,
Ivkovic, Smith, and Weisbenner, 2008) suggest that social interaction is an important
determinant of portfolio choice. If peer effects are driving our results we would expect a
significant overlap in positions of these two groups of investors. In fact, we find quite the
opposite: holding of a security by a peer does not increase the likelihood that the security is also
held by manager, nor does it affect the size of the position. Moreover, we see the significant
underperformance of managers vis-a-vis wealthiest 1% of investors. It is, therefore, unlikely that
our results are due to social interaction between managers and peers.
It is important to note that this paper is deliberately focused on performance of managers as a
group relative to their peers. We are not trying to explain performance ranking within the
managers group; this question deserves a separate study.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 1 we describe our data sources and
present descriptive statistics of characteristics of managers and control groups of investors.
Section 2 presents results. Section 3 concludes.