The paper discusses the contemporaneous and lagged association between aggregate mutual fund flows and stock market performance in Brazil. The goals of the paper are (1) to ascertain whether aggregate stock fund flows are determined by the behavior of stock market, currency exchange market and interest rates, on a daily basis, and (2) to verify whether the behavior aggregate fund flows can be used to predict future stock market price behavior. With the aid of tools of time-series analysis, the results obtained herein indicate that the answer to the first question is affirmative, but that the answer to the second question is negative, a result supportive of the belief that the Brazilian stock market is semistrong efficient regarding information on fund flows.
Stock funds; fund flows; Bovespa Index; semistrong efficiency; causality