Assessing sentiment timing ability and mutual fund manager skill

We develop a method that can statistically identify fund managers that exhibit selectivity in their trades, and find that occurrences of good and bad selectivity exceed random expectation. Mutual funds exhibit selectivity by tilting their portfolios towards the better performing stocks when they buy (sell) stocks with high sentiment betas preceding an increase (decrease) in investor sentiment. Conversely, funds that incorrectly time investor sentiment exhibit bad stock selection, explaining the above random incidence of this behavior. Our method can distinguish skill from fortuitous stock selection, and provides a practical tool for evaluating the performance of fund managers