Research On The Relationship Between The Investor Attention And Open-end Fund Cash Flows

As one of important characteristics of limited rationality,attention has important applications in the fields of asset pricing and investment decision-making.In the era of the Internet,compared to scarce attention,investors are faced with exponential growth,accelerating and complex internet information.This imbalance will have an impact on investor decision-making.In this context,this paper attempts to explore whether the overload information and the limited attention will affect the investment decisions of fund investors,and thus affect the cash flow of funds.Text messages posted by investors are downloaded from an online fund forum in China.We build the Investor Attention Index based on the number of post and Investor Sentiment Index based on the post content by using Naive Bayes Classifier.The empirical results show that Investor Attention Index and Investor Sentiment Index have an important impact on the cash flow of open-end funds.Besides,Investor Attention Index positively affect fund cash flows and this effect is greater as the investor are optimistic than as they are pessimistic;Besides fund size and fund age will affect the relationship between investor attention and fund cash flows.