Are Institutions Informed About News?


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Abstract

This paper combines daily non-public data on buy and sell volume by institutions from 2003 through 2005 for NYSE-listed stocks with all news announcements from Reuters. Natural language processing categorizes the sentiment associated with each news story. We use institutional order flow (buy volume minus sell volume) as a quantitative measure of net trading by institutions. We find evidence that institutional investors are informed: i) institutional trading volume predicts the occurrence of news announcements; ii) institutional order flow predicts the sentiment of the news; iii) institutional order flow predicts the stock market reaction on news announcement days; and iv) institutional order flow predicts earnings announcement surprises.
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Myra Lissenberg
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