In emerging markets, the number of different people buying a stock is a better predictor of its success than how much money they actually spent.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
Abnormal Fund Holding Count and Stock Returns
SSRN · 6507112
The Takeaway
Large investors usually move the market, so most analysts track 'whale' movements. However, this paper finds that the 'breadth' of ownership (how many different fund managers buy in) is a far more accurate signal of future gains than the total weight of the capital.
From the abstract
Existing literature questions whether mutual fund holdings convey information for predicting stock returns in emerging markets. We argue that this lack of evidence stems from a methodological limitation: conventional value-weighted holding measures are dominated by a few large funds, obscuring the collective signal from numerous smaller, but potentially more informed managers. This scale-induced distortion masks the true breadth of institutional attention. To address this, we propose the Abno