The Effects of Stale Prices on Mutual Funds

Daily liquidity to investors is promised by mutual funds, which allows them to redeem their money based on the prevailing Net Asset Value (NAV). A number of factors like trading suspension and daily price limits can cause redeemed NAV to deviate from the intrinsic values of fund units. Such “staleness” in prices can create arbitrage opportunities for the investors, who can invest or redeem their money at the expense of other passive investors. Using hand-collected data from quarterly mutual fund holdings, we documented significant deviations between the announced and “true” NAVs of Iranian mutual funds. We found that the investors reacted to and took advantage of such deviations. The wealth transfer between the fund investors was estimated to be approximately 1.3% of Total Net Asset (TNA), which was 4 times larger than the wealth transfer documented in the previous studies.