IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ris/joefas/0040.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Shamans of Wall Street: A Real Conundrum in Finance. Why Systematically Poor Performing Asset Managers Survive?

Author

Listed:
  • Delgado, Fransico A.

    (Universidad ESAN)

  • Cueto, Diego C.

    (Universidad ESAN)

Abstract

In this paper we propose a behavioral explanation for the survival of poorly performing asset managers. We argue that, in general, asset managers make use of copious amounts of correct but useless information to convince investors about their supposed superior ability to interpret the market. Their marketing skills and motivational speeches seem to be enough to maintain asset managers in business regardless of the results. We present data that show how bad a number of asset managers can be. We also show how prevalent asset managers’ underperformance is. We argue that some Wall Street professionals are able to fool almost all of their clients most of the time into believing that they add value in the services they provide while the data show that this is not true. What we cannot show with this data is whether managers actually believe they are as good as they claim they are, or are not just shamans, albeit shameless as well.

Suggested Citation

  • Delgado, Fransico A. & Cueto, Diego C., 2012. "The Shamans of Wall Street: A Real Conundrum in Finance. Why Systematically Poor Performing Asset Managers Survive?," Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Science, Universidad ESAN, vol. 17(32), pages 33-40.
  • Handle: RePEc:ris:joefas:0040
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.esan.edu.pe/publicaciones/2012/05/23/journal32_delgado_cueto.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mehra, Rajnish & Prescott, Edward C., 1985. "The equity premium: A puzzle," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2), pages 145-161, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Les Coleman, 2023. "Explaining mutual fund behavior through the structure‐conduct‐performance lens," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(3), pages 2874-2884, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Buss, Adrian, 2013. "Capital controls and international financial stability: a dynamic general equilibrium analysis in incomplete markets," Working Paper Series 1578, European Central Bank.
    2. Christiane Goodfellow & Dirk Schiereck & Steffen Wippler, 2013. "Are behavioural finance equity funds a superior investment? A note on fund performance and market efficiency," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 14(2), pages 111-119, April.
    3. Croce, M.M. & Nguyen, Thien T. & Raymond, S. & Schmid, L., 2019. "Government debt and the returns to innovation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 132(3), pages 205-225.
    4. Rhys Bidder & Ian Dew-Becker, 2016. "Long-Run Risk Is the Worst-Case Scenario," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(9), pages 2494-2527, September.
    5. Athanasopoulos, George & de Carvalho Guillén, Osmani Teixeira & Issler, João Victor & Vahid, Farshid, 2011. "Model selection, estimation and forecasting in VAR models with short-run and long-run restrictions," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 164(1), pages 116-129, September.
    6. Alan Gregory, 2011. "The Expected Cost of Equity and the Expected Risk Premium in the UK," Review of Behavioral Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 3(1), pages 1-26, April.
    7. Smoluk, H. J. & Neveu, Raymond P., 2002. "Consumption and asset prices: An analysis across income groups," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 11(1), pages 47-62.
    8. Coudert, Virginie & Mignon, Valérie, 2013. "The “forward premium puzzle” and the sovereign default risk," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 491-511.
    9. Karen K. Lewis, 2011. "Global Asset Pricing," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 3(1), pages 435-466, December.
    10. Diego Comin, 2004. "R&D: A Small Contribution to Productivity Growth," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 9(4), pages 391-421, December.
    11. Auffret, Philippe, 2001. "An alternative unifying measure of welfare gains from risk-sharing," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2676, The World Bank.
    12. Luigi Guiso, 2015. "A Test of Narrow Framing and its Origin," Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, Springer;Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association), vol. 1(1), pages 61-100, March.
    13. Kevin J. Lansing, 2011. "Asset pricing with concentrated ownership of capital," Working Paper 2011/18, Norges Bank.
    14. Stavros Panageas & Nicolae Garleanu, 2008. "Yooung, Old, Conservative and Bold: The implications of finite lives and heterogeneity for asset prices," 2008 Meeting Papers 409, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    15. Shi, Yun & Cui, Xiangyu & Zhou, Xunyu, 2020. "Beta and Coskewness Pricing: Perspective from Probability Weighting," SocArXiv 5rqhv, Center for Open Science.
    16. Benjamin Eden, 2004. "Substitution and Risk Aversion: Is Risk Aversion Important for Understanding Asset Prices?," Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers 0422, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics.
    17. Siddiqi, Hammad, 2015. "Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic: A Unified Explanation for Equity Puzzles," MPRA Paper 68729, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Graham Elliott & Ivana Komunjer & Allan Timmermann, 2008. "Biases in Macroeconomic Forecasts: Irrationality or Asymmetric Loss?," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(1), pages 122-157, March.
    19. Robert J. Shiller & Stefano Athanasoulis, 1995. "World Income Components: Measuring and Exploiting International Risk Sharing Opportunities," NBER Working Papers 5095, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Huang, Jiexiang & Guo, Wei & Zhang, Jin E., 2020. "Do stocks outperform bank deposits in China?," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ris:joefas:0040. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ESAN Ediciones (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/esannpe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.