Korean equities · 2010-01-04 to 2026-09-119,120,274 ticker-daysPersonal project

Does daily foreign flow predict returns?

Pre-event institutional positioning and the earnings surprise →

Korea publishes foreign ownership per stock every day. The premise was that foreign investors digest information more slowly and split larger orders, so their flow is persistent, and that a daily disclosure of it is hard to replicate. This page is generated from the measurement outputs, so every figure below is the one the code last produced.

The premise is refuted. Domestic institutional flow is more persistent than foreign flow at lag 1 (ratio 0.43). Persistence is a property of institutional execution, not of foreign investors, so the foreign disclosure has no special claim on it.

Some results are older than the raw data or missing: combination.json, level_se.json. Re-run those measurements before relying on this page.

The control group

Is the persistence specific to foreign investors?

Two hypotheses fit the persistence curve equally well: that foreign flow is special, or that all large institutional flow is persistent because big orders get split over days. The domestic-institution series separates them.

lagInstitutionstForeigntratio f/k
1+0.2982+235.9+0.1295+95.20.43
2+0.2241+199.6+0.1195+100.70.53
3+0.1801+164.5+0.0991+95.50.55
5+0.1376+127.4+0.0780+80.90.57
10+0.0951+96.9+0.0527+61.00.55
20+0.0603+62.2+0.0284+35.30.47
Return prediction and costs

Does it predict price, and can it be traded?

horizonmean ICtdaysgross/yrturnovernet/yr
1d+0.00392+3.933,363+6.25%320.0x-89.73%
5d-0.00036-0.373,360-0.54%64.0x-19.73%
20d-0.00405-4.513,350-1.34%16.0x-6.14%

Net is after 30bp one-way, applied to the measured turnover of both legs.

Where the effect lives

Information coefficient by horizon and liquidity

horizonThin thirdMiddleLiquid third
1d+0.00919t +7.26+0.00695t +7.36+0.00066t +0.69
5d+0.00598t +3.96+0.00337t +3.30-0.00416t -4.17
20d-0.00090t -0.48-0.00179t -1.54-0.00492t -4.44

Newey-West t beneath each coefficient. A cell greyed out is indistinguishable from zero.

Is the information its own?

After residualising against standard factors

horizonraw ICtresidual ICtkept
1d+0.00359+4.02+0.00229+3.4364%
5d-0.00053-0.60-0.00175-2.60333%
20d-0.00464-5.16-0.00597-8.05129%

Residualised each day against size, liquidity, reversal_5d, momentum_60d, momentum_120d, volatility_20d.

The level family

What the published t-statistics are actually worth

signalICt as publishedt Newey-Westlag-1 ACindependent obs.reading
level, 20d+0.13307+47.59+13.60+0.945131of 1,607holds up
level_z, 20d+0.01549+9.61+2.78+0.910135of 1,607marginal
d60, 20d+0.01002+7.57+2.29+0.887147of 1,607marginal
d120, 20d+0.01651+10.97+3.14+0.917132of 1,607holds up
level, 60d+0.17406+66.34+10.87+0.97542of 1,567holds up
level_z, 60d+0.01405+7.93+1.28+0.95741of 1,567WAS significant, is NOT
d60, 60d+0.01307+9.51+1.68+0.93649of 1,567WAS significant, is NOT
d120, 60d+0.01612+9.36+1.48+0.96739of 1,567WAS significant, is NOT

A high lag-1 autocorrelation means consecutive daily coefficients are nearly the same number, so the published t counts the same evidence many times over.

The noise filter

Do the rule-derived rebalance dates find anything?

dayvs baseline |flow|
-51.06×
-41.02×
-31.03×
-21.05×
-11.05×
+01.02× ← effective date
+11.07×
+21.04×
+31.03×
+41.01×
+51.02×

136 rule-derived effective dates. A calendar that found real events would show a clear hump at zero.

Still open

The two series disagree

Two views of the same activity agree at 0.10

The signal is a stock measure — the daily change in foreign shares held. The exchange separately publishes foreign net buying, a flow measure. Across 4,095 overlapping days and 3,615 tickers the mean daily rank correlation is +0.1046, the tenth percentile is -0.0037 and the worst day is -0.2352.

One of the two is not measuring what we assume. Candidates: settlement-date against trade-date convention, securities lending and custody transfers moving holdings without a trade, depositary-receipt conversions, in-kind index creation, and a known misclassification of orders routed through domestic brokers. It does not change the verdict — there is no edge on either reading — but it changes what the numbers mean.