Brad Barber

Professor of Finance, Graduate School of Management UC Davis
Email: bmbarber@ucdavis.edu

Professor Brad Barber is an internationally recognized authority on investor psychology, stock analyst recommendations, online trading, and mutual fund performance. His research includes the effect of expenses on money flowing into mutual funds, gender-related overconfidence in stock trading, the impact of coordinated trading by individual investors, and how active equity trading is hazardous to individual investor wealth.

His research has been covered extensively in the media, including Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and he has appeared on ABC News, NBC Nightly News, CNN, MSNBC and CNBC.

Related Publications

Private Company Valuations by Mutual Funds

Mutual funds that hold private securities value these securities at considerably different prices. Prices vary across fund families, are updated every 2.5 quarters on average and are revised dramatically at follow-on funding events. The infrequent, but dramatic price changes yield predictable fund returns, though we find little evidence of fund investors exploiting this opportunity by buying (selling) before (after) the follow-on funding events. Consistent with fund families opportunistically marking up private securities, we find that funds near the top of league tables increase private valuations more around year-end follow-on funding events than funds ranked lower.
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