Academic Seminar Series, Once a Trader, always a Trader: The Role of Traders in Fund Management, Thursday, December 11th, 2025 / Time: 15:15 – 16:30, University Senate Room
Department of Banking and Financial Management
University of Piraeus
Academic Seminar Series
Thursday, December 11th, 2025 / Time: 15:15 – 16:30, University Senate Room
Once a Trader, always a Trader: The Role of Traders in Fund Management
Gjergji Cici
University of Kansas
Abstract
Mutual fund families are increasingly assigning traders to manage corporate bond mutual funds. Using this setting to study the role of traders in investment management, we document that trader managers identify and exploit short-term trading opportunities at lower transaction costs. These skills are particularly valuable during periods of market stress. Moreover, trader managers exhibit sophisticated risk management behavior: They reduce credit risk during periods of market stress and take more maturity risk during periods of large interest rate fluctuations, while holding
portfolios with greater convexity. The combination of these skills produces relative outperformance during periods of large interest rate fluctuations.
Gjergji Cici is the Koch Professor in Business Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business. He also is a research fellow at the Centre for Financial Research at the University of Cologne, Germany. Prior to joining KU in 2018, he was the Thomas L. Owen Professor and associate professor of finance at the College of William & Mary. After receiving his Ph.D. in finance from the University of Minnesota, he became associate director of research for Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) at the Wharton School of Business.
His research has been published in Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Finance, Real Estate Economics, Journal of Financial Intermediation, and Journal of Banking and Finance, among others. Professor Cici’s research has been discussed in various regulatory proposals related to the mutual fund industry and featured in more than 40 articles in the business press, including the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Bloomberg, and Pensions & Investments.