Holding on to the Losers: Finnish Evidence

Recent literature reports evidence on investor behavior that is inconsistent with traditional finance theory. One currently being debated is behavioral irrationality, the tendency of investors to hold losing investments too long and sell winning investments too soon, a phenomenon known as the disposition effect. We analyze the trading records of all individual investors in the Finnish stock market and document that capital losses reduce the selling propensity of investors. There is, however, no opposite effect identifiable with respect to capital gains. We also find, somewhat surprisingly, that both positive and negative historical returns significantly reinforce the negative association between the selling propensity of investors and capital losses. While these findings offer no direct support for the disposition effect, they do suggest that investors are loss averse.     

Individual Characteristics and the Disposition Effect: The Opposing Effects of Confidence and Self-Regard

We conduct two experiments to examine potential causes of the disposition effect. In Experiment 1, we rule out beliefs in mean reversion as a cause of the disposition effect. Although a belief in the mean reversion of stock prices should be independent of whether an investor owns or only follows the stock, we show only investors who own the stock behave as though prices will reverse. In Experiment 2, participants buy and sell securities over multiple periods. We find that self-regard and investing confidence (two types of self-esteem) have opposing influences on investors’ tendency to hold losing investments. Investors with lower self-regard hold losing investments longer than those with higher self-regard, and investors with higher confidence hold losing investments longer than those with lower confidence. We focus on investors’ tendency to hold losing stocks too long because prior research suggests the gain versus loss sides of the disposition effect are driven by different biases.     

Are Hungarian investors reluctant to realize their losses?

We examine whether Hungarian investors liquidate their winning investments too early and close their losing positions too late. We analyze 130 university students' trading activity for 2009 and 2010. We investigate the disposition effect by four distinct methodologies: by the realized and non-realized gains and losses; by comparing the length of the holding periods; by analyzing the whole length of open positions and by comparing the performance of the transactions. We discover that Hungarian investors exhibit a disposition effect that worsens their investment performance in general. According to our results, the investors time their sale and purchase orders inaccurately.     

中国股票市场个体投资者"处置效应"的实证研究

利用中国个体投资者交易帐户的交易数据,本文对中国股票市场个体投资者"处置效应"进行了实证分析,并考察了中国股票市场是否存在"十二月效应"对"处置效应"的影响.依据情绪影响投资者决策的心理学结论,本文进一步分析了在不同的市场态势下,个体投资者"处置效应"的特征.本文研究表明,中国个体投资者存在显著的"处置效应",并在不同市场态势下表现出不同的特征,十二月份存在"反处置效应"现象.     

Market states and disposition effect: evidence from Taiwan mutual fund investors

We study the disposition effect across market states in the context of mutual fund investors in Taiwan. Using mutual fund data at the fund and individual levels during July 2001 to October 2008, we find that the disposition effect varies across market states. Our results suggest that investors redeem their mutual fund units more under a bear market than a bull market when they have extreme capital losses. When investors have moderate capital gains, they are less active in redeeming their mutual fund units under a bull market relative to a bear market. Under a neutral market, investors actively redeem mutual fund units in both winner and loser mutual funds except when they have extreme capital losses. Thus, disposition effect is not uniform; it varies by market condition. In addition, the disposition effect phenomenon also exists for Taiwan mutual fund investors as well. Our findings are robust to aggregate and individual investor levels.     

Individual Differences in the Disposition Effect

The authors model the role of personality traits in explaining the disposition effect building on realization utility theory and Big 5 model and moving from an aggregate level to interindividual differences. The experimental analysis, combining NEO Revised Personality Inventory measures with individual financial data from a trading simulation run by 230 individuals in China and Italy, shows that the disposition effect is driven by 2 distinct psychological processes, one related to holding losers and the other to selling winners. These 2 behavioral mechanisms are uncorrelated and influenced by different personality traits. Controlling for different demographic variables, the authors show (a) a greater sensitivity of the rewarding system that motivates “extroverts” to quickly sell the stock at gain to receive a burst of utility; (b) a tendency for “conscientious” subjects to suppress impulsivity, patiently waiting for higher cumulative returns; and (c) the importance of “openness to experience” to better value information to achieve higher outcomes.     

Irrational Mutual Fund Managers: Explaining Differences in Their Behavior

Documenting the disposition effect for a large sample of mutual fund managers in the United States, we find that stock-level characteristics explain the cross-sectional variation of the effect. The disposition effect, which is the tendency to sell winner stocks too early and hold on to loser stocks for too long, is more pronounced for fund managers who invest in stocks that are more difficult to value. Using different measures of stock and market uncertainty, we show that mutual fund managers display a stronger disposition-driven behavior when stocks are more difficult to value. We also find that the level of the disposition effect is monotonically increasing with the level of systematic risk (i.e., beta). In addition, we document that the trading behavior of mutual fund managers is partly driven by attention-grabbing stocks (dividend-paying stocks). Overall, our results suggest that stock-level uncertainty and trading of attention-grabbing stocks amplify the disposition effect and that differences in the effect can be explained by mutual fund managers' investment styles. Given that mutual funds hold a large fraction of the U.S. equity market, our findings add to the ongoing discussion whether professional investors can create stock mispricings and shed new light on market efficiency.     

From Returns to Tweets and Back: An Investigation of the Stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average

A sizeable percentage of investors are using social media to obtain information about companies (Cogent Research [2008]). As a consequence, social media content about firms may have an impact on stock prices (Hachman [2011]). Various studies utilize social media content to forecast stock market-related factors such as returns, volatility, or trading volume. The objective of this article is to investigate whether a bidirectional intraday relationship between stock returns and volatility and tweets exists. The study analyzed 150,180 minute-by-minute stock price and tweet data for the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over a random 13-day interval from June 2 to June 18, 2014 using a BEKK-MVGARCH methodology. Findings indicate that 87% of stock returns are influenced by lagged innovations of the tweets data, but there is little evidence to support that the direction is reciprocal, with only 7% of tweets being influenced by lagged innovations of the stock returns. Results further show that the lagged innovations from 40 percent of stock returns affect the current conditional volatility of the tweets, while 73 percent of tweets affect the current conditional volatility of stock returns. Moreover, there is strong evidence to suggest that the volatility originating from the returns to the tweets persists for 33 percent of stocks; the volatility originating from the tweets to the returns persists for 73 percent of stocks. Last, 53 percent of stocks exhibit both immediate and persistent impacts from returns to tweets, while 90 percent of stocks exhibit both immediate and persistent impacts from tweets to returns. These results may help traders achieve superior returns by buying and selling individual stocks or options. Also, asset and mutual fund managers may benefit by developing a social media strategy.     

个人投资者交易行为研究——来自台湾股市的证据

本文基于台湾股市数据,主要研究个人投资者的交易行为。参照Kaniel et al.(2008)构建了个人投资者交易不平衡性指标─净交易,以反映投资者股票交易的强度。采用这种交易不平衡性指标来构建投资组合研究个人投资者的交易行为。首先研究个人投资者交易和股票的收益之间的动态关系从而分析投资者的交易策略,然后研究个人投资者净交易的收益预测能力从而分析个人投资者交易的信息含量。本文研究发现:台湾股票市场的个人投资者采用负反馈的交易策略,并且个人投资者在交易中表现出很强的处置效应;个人投资者在交易中的信息含量不足;个人投资者交易中的盈利主要来自两个方面:过度反应和价格冲击。文章最后给出政策建议。     

The relationship between the Vietnam stock market and its major trading partners – TECM with bivariate asymmetric GARCH model

This study employs threshold error-correction model with bivariate Glosten–Jagannathan–Runkle-generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model to examine the relationship between the Vietnam stock market and its major trading partners, the United States, Japan, Singapore and China. The results indicate that the Vietnam stock market and return risks are influenced by Japan and Singapore stock markets. We also find that the volatility of stock market in Vietnam and its trading countries have an asymmetrical effect. These findings could be valuable to individual investors and financial institutions holding long-run investment portfolios in the Vietnam stock market.     

Disposition Effect and Tolerance to Losses in Stock Investment Decisions: An Experimental Study

This study aims to verify whether people tolerate losses within the self-established limit through an experimental methodological procedure. In addition, it aims to analyze the decision behavior in terms of the time they take to realize gains and losses, as a way to test the manifestation of the disposition effect. The experiment consists in decision to sell stock from 4 companies, 2 with potentially negative returns and 2 with positive returns. The participants demonstrated that they accept more losses than they had attested they would bear in advance and manifested the typical disposition effect, under which people sell the winning stock earlier than the losing stock. There was no difference between men and women in the manifestation of the disposition effect, and women performed worse because they had established lower bearable losses and higher required gains in advance.     

Blowing Bubbles

The forecasts of individual investors, surveyed by Gallup/PaineWebber, imply that they believed that the market was in a bubble in the late 1990s and expected the bubble to continue to inflate; many investors thought that the stock market was overvalued in the late 1990s but many also thought that it was a good time to invest. The forecasts of institutional investors, surveyed by Business Week, imply that they too believed that the market was in a bubble in the late 1990s, but they expected the bubble to burst. Institutional investors were bearish in the late 1990s, but turned bullish after the stock market decline of 2000, while individual investors turned bearish.     

Money Attitude Typology and Stock Investment

This study identifies segments of individual investors based on their money attitudes (attitude toward financial security, attitude toward stock investing, obsession with money, perceived immorality of the stock market, attitude toward gambling, interest in financial matters, attitude toward saving, frankness about finances). A cluster analysis of data from a representative mail survey conducted in Switzerland (N = 1,569) yielded four main segments of individual investors we term safe players, open books, money dummies, and risk-seekers. This typology has forecast value for behavior: Each type differed with regard to having investment portfolios, buying and selling securities, risk tolerance for maximization of capital, response to price fluctuations, and willingness to make environmentally and socially responsible investments.     

The disposition effect and loss aversion: Do gender differences matter?

This paper analyzes gender differences in the disposition effect in an experiment based on Weber and Camerer (1998). The results emphasize that female investors realize less capital losses, have significantly higher disposition effects and are more loss averse than men.     

Cash Flow Is King? Cognitive Errors by Investors

When investors fixate on current earnings, they commit a cognitive error and fail to fully value the information contained in accruals and cash flows. Extending the accrual anomaly documented by Sloan [1996], we identify significant excess returns from a cash flow-based trading strategy. The market consistently underestimates the transitory nature of accruals and the long-term persistence of cash flows. We find that the accrual anomaly derives from the poor performance of high accrual firms, which are more likely to manage earnings. Combining the accrual and cash flow information also reveals that investors misvalue the quality of earnings. Contrary to Fama [1998], these anomalies are robust to the three-factor model with equally or value-weighted portfolio returns.     

An Experimental Study of the Disposition Effect: Evidence From Macau

The disposition effect-the tendency to sell winning transactions too soon and hold losing transactions too long-is examined experimentally in Macau. The findings show that the disposition effect exists strongly under the modified version of the experiment designed by Weber and Camerer [1998]. This study also points out that a psychological factor, the locus of control, can partly explain the disposition effect observed in this experiment.     

Short sale constraints,disperse pessimistic beliefs and market efficiency — Evidence from the Chinese stock market

In the Chinese stock market, the regulatory agency lists qualified stocks on announcement date and permits investors to sell short on the effective date, a practice that allows us to directly study the impact of short sale constraints. Applying an event study to 511 additions, between February 2010 and August 2013, of individual stocks to the list of securities qualified for short sale, we find that short sale constraints cause individual stocks to be overpriced and that such overvaluation is exclusively related to distortions associated with pessimistic beliefs. In addition, we observe lower volatility, skewness and extreme value frequency of stock returns after short sale constraints are lifted. This implies the emergence of a more appropriate distribution of returns and improved market efficiency at the individual stock level as the range of securities qualified for short selling expands.     

Productivity growth and stock returns: firm- and aggregate-level analyses

A firm’s stock return is affected not only by its own productivity growth rate, but also by other firms’ productivity growth rates. We show that this spillover effect is significant and time-varying, and underlies a fallacy of composition observed in late 20th century U.S. data: stock returns and productivity growth are correlated positively in firm-level data but negatively in aggregate data. This seeming fallacy of composition reflects Schumpeterian creative destruction: a few technology winners’ stocks rise with their rising productivity while many technology losers’ stocks fall with their declining productivity. Thus, most individual firms’ stock returns correlate negatively with aggregate productivity growth. This implies that technological innovation need not be a blessing for all firms and as a result, for investors holding the market. Our findings also provide a firm-level technology innovation-based explanation of prior findings that the market return correlates negatively with aggregate earnings.     

Minimax regret and strategic uncertainty

This paper introduces a new solution concept, a minimax regret equilibrium, which allows for the possibility that players are uncertain about the rationality and conjectures of their opponents. We provide several applications of our concept. In particular, we consider price-setting environments and show that optimal pricing policy follows a non-degenerate distribution. The induced price dispersion is consistent with experimental and empirical observations (Baye and Morgan (2004) [4]).     

A Behavioral Model of Stock Market Investors' Impact on Consumption

This paper offers a theory of investor/consumer behavior in the context of an adaptive relationship. It shows how consumer spending and stock market gains and losses interact in a "gradual diffusion" process. The model offers predictions about likely changes in investor behavior, and the impact on the underlying economy in general and consumption in particular. These predictions are validated empirically. Specifically, the paper finds that investors/consumers gradually smooth their "wealth spending" and accelerate consumption as they become more convinced that their gains are permanent. This is somewhat reminiscent of the "income smoothing" suggested by Friedman [1957]. We present evidence that the consumption wealth spending peaks at approximately 2.5%-3% of the stock market wealth cumulative gain in the previous twelve- to twenty-four-month period, while concurrent effects are negligible. The results also provide a partial explanation for the long cycle of a strong economy in the 1990s, and point out the danger to the economy from a prolonged stock market decline.