Short-term institutional investors and the diffusion of supply chain information

Abstract

What informational advantage do short-term investors have? This paper demonstrates that short-term investors can benefit from the ability to process public, but slowly diffusing, supply chain information ahead of other market participants. In support of this argument, we find that short-term investors establish larger long and short positions in firms with high customer concentration. In addition, an increase in short-term institutional ownership is associated with higher stock returns in firms with high customer concentration, supporting the informational advantage hypothesis. Finally, the relationship between customer concentration and short-term institutional ownership strengthens in high information asymmetry environment. In contrast, we do not find preference towards high customer concentration firms among long-term institutions, who are less positioned to exploit short-lived informational benefits.