Due to the 2000s’ expansion of subscribers of the variable life insurance, the installment equity fund, and the retirement pension fund, institutional investors are now a main player in stock markets, representing a large fraction of equity ownership ...
Due to the 2000s’ expansion of subscribers of the variable life insurance, the installment equity fund, and the retirement pension fund, institutional investors are now a main player in stock markets, representing a large fraction of equity ownership and large proportion of trading volume. For example, in 2013 institutional investors accounted for 44.7% of total Korean equity ownership and 50.7% of total trading volume.
Institutional investors have important features that distinguish them from individuals, because they are basically fiduciaries who manage the assets of others with prudent discretion. The prior studies reported that institutional investors were different from individuals in the size of their asset portfolio, their capacity of informational analysis, the compensation scheme, and the investment constraints.
The changes in the relative importance of the investor groups with different features would cause a shift in the demand of the ‘representative’ investor, having impact on each stock’s valuation, volatility, and liquidity and the quality of the overall market. Thus, in-depth studies on institutions’ trading behaviors and their impact on the stock markets are necessary to forecasts the future stock market and improve a system for the stock market development.
For this reason, this paper studied the trading behaviors of the aggregate institutions and each type of institutions (Securities Company, Bank, Insurance Company, Mutual Funds, Pension Fund, etc.) by diachronic analysis, using a long-period database (from 1999 to 2009) containing detailed information of every transaction on the KSE (Korea Stock Exchange). Especially, in this study, I investigated whether aggregate institutional preferences changed over time, whether shifts in institutional preferences resulted from changes in the relative importance of different types of institutional investors or from changes in the preferences of each type of institutional investor, and why institutional investors’ preferences changed.
Our results revealed that over the entire sample period, aggregate institution investors had the preferences for larger, less volatile, and more liquid stocks, however, in the latter sample period, this conservative preferences were significantly weakened. After the mid-2000s, their preferences for the stocks with lower total volatility, larger capitalizations, higher dividend ratios, and higher liquidity have been disappeared, and their preferences for the stocks with lower idiosyncratic risk and higher prices have been significantly weakened. They started to prefer the stocks with higher book-to-market ratios, such as value stocks.
I found that the shift in the aggregate preferences was attributed to both changes in the relative importance of different types of institutional investors and changes in the preferences of each group by examining time variation in preference impacts and preferences for each type of institutional investor. That is, more conservative types of institutional investors (e.g., Securities Company, Bank) have become relatively less important over time while less conservative type (e.g., Mutual Funds, Pension Funds) have become more important. At the same time, each type of institutional investor has moved toward smaller, riskier stocks over time. I suggest that institutional investors have moved toward ‘less expensive’ smaller, riskier stocks because institutional demand shocks combined with institutional investors’ historical preferences for stable and liquid securities have driven the relative valuations of these stocks higher over time.
This study found the changes of the trading behavior of the aggregate institutions and each type of institutions in KSE through diachronic analysis for the first time. The results help to anticipate the effect of future institutionalization on stock market.