Hedge Funds and Public Information Acquisition

Hedge funds actively acquire publicly available financial disclosures. Funds acquiring such information subsequently earn 1.5% higher annualized abnormal returns than nonacquirers. Trades by the same fund in the same quarter are more profitable when accompanied by public information acquisition. Acquiring public filings is relatively less profitable when macrouncertainty is high. Funds employ a wide range of strategies for acquiring public filings. Those that systematically scrape large volumes of information, specialize in certain filing types, acquire filings with more content changes, or access information immediately outperform other funds. This paper was accepted by Lukas Schmid, finance. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4466 .