How fund manager speaks values: evidence from China

Confidence, especially in the form of overconfidence, is a crucial psychological factor that influences fund managers’ investment behaviours. However, how to reliably quantify it remains an open question. The self-marketing endeavours via video-sharing platforms of mutual fund companies in China have unexpectedly provided persuasive avenue to gauge confidence through video appearances. This paper proposes a novel data integration framework, combining with multimodal content understanding techniques, and offers calculations of nonverbal personal traits from videos circulated in social media. In particular, we focus on managers’ vocal cues and construct a confidence measure from vocal pitch. Our findings reveal a substantial relation between vocal confidence and fund managers’ investment decisions. Our work also underscores the potential of multimodal data from social media in disclosing nuanced findings in the interdisciplinary studies of finance and psychology.