Investor Sentiment,Trading Behavior and Informational Efficiency in Index Futures Markets

This paper shows that traders in index futures markets are positive feedback traders—they buy when prices increase and sell when prices decline. Positive feedback trading appears to be more active in periods of high investor sentiment. This finding is consistent with the notion that feedback trading is driven by expectations of noise traders. Consistent with the noise trading hypothesis, order flow in index futures markets is less informative when investors are optimistic. Transitory volatility measured at high frequencies also appears to decline in periods of bullish sentiment, suggesting that sentiment‐driven trading increases market liquidity.     

Investor type trading behavior and trade performance: Evidence from the Thai stock market

This paper examines the trading behavior and decomposes the trading performance of foreign, individual and institutional investors as well as proprietary traders in a dynamic emerging stock market, the Stock Exchange of Thailand. Foreign investors follow a positive feedback, momentum strategy and are good short term market timers but have poor security selection performance in poor markets, thus suggesting that they have a macro (market timing) but not a micro (security selection) informational advantage relative to local investors. Institutions and proprietary traders have poor security selection trading performance. Individuals display herding behavior and have fairly good security selection performance, but individual investors appear to compensate proprietary traders for the provision of short term liquidity by proprietary traders, so individuals' security selection gains are canceled out by market timing losses.     

Trading location and equity returns: Evidence from US trading of British cross-listed firms

Our study examines market sentiment and the importance of trading location in British American Depository Receipts (ADRs) traded in the US. Perfect integration between UK markets and UK ADRs is ruled out given that UK ADRs exhibit an intraday, U-shaped volatility curve. Both a variance decomposition analysis and an EGARCH model show that UK ADR returns are driven more by US market returns than US-traded UK ETF returns. These results indicate the existence of US market sentiment for UK ADRs and that trading location influences pricing behavior.     

Market Sentiment and Investor Overreaction: Evidence from New York Listed Asian Country Exchange Traded Funds

This article investigates Asian Country Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) price deviation with underlying due to market sentiment. By implementing a dynamic contrarian trading strategy and a buy-and-hold strategy, this article finds that significant abnormal excess trading profit can be generated by capitalizing on the overnight price reversion. The excess return generated by the dynamic strategy over buy-and-hold separates the influence of market sentiment to ETF price deviation from fundamental movements. By studying the relations between variations of the excess returns and market sentiment, the article finds that the ETF price deviation is highly influenced by market sentiment and the effect exacerbates during financial crisis and distress.     

The Effect of Investor Sentiment on Feedback Trading and Trading Frequency: Evidence from Taiwan Intraday Data

Abstract

Although extensive literature has suggested that investor sentiment may be one of the most important factors in explaining investor trading frequency and trading strategies, how individual investors are significantly influenced by sentiment remains underexplored. The feature of numerous individual investors in the Taiwan stock market provides an avenue to examine the relationship of investor sentiment to trading frequency and positive-feedback trading according to intraday data. Using a vector autoregression model to measure feedback trading in one-minute intervals, we find that trading frequency appears to increase in periods of rising market, suggesting that investor sentiment–driven trading increases market trading frequency without relying on past experiences to conduct trading behavior.     

Trading behaviour and market sentiment: Firm-level evidence from an emerging Islamic market

We provide firm-level evidence from an emerging Islamic market that individual investors' trading behaviour causes weekend sentiment. Using data for 285 companies listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) for the period from 2002 to 2019 and applying appropriate econometric techniques, the paper has found evidence of weekend effect both on return and volatility. The results confirm that individual investors' sentiment drives the weekend effect in DSE. ‘Information content theory’ and ‘information processing hypothesis’ work for investors so that the market return and volatility become significantly different on Sunday. The market sentiment effect is significant for smaller firms and low dividend yield firms where individual investors are prevalent, suggesting that trading behaviour of individual investors determines weekend sentiment. A positive feedback relationship exists between returns on Sunday and the previous Thursday for both institutions and individuals. Our results are robust in various alternative specifications.     

US and Domestic Market Gains and Asian Investors’ Overconfident Trading Behavior

We find that subsequent to both US and domestic market gains, both Asian individual and institutional investors increase their trading and that this effect is more pronounced in bull markets, in periods of relatively favorable investor sentiment, in periods of extremely high market returns, and in markets with short‐sale constraints. We also find that individual investors trade more in response to market gains than institutional investors. Moreover, we find that further integration of Asian stock markets with US stock markets after the Asian financial crisis in 1998 is an important reason for Asian investors’ response to US market gains.     

Futures Market Sentiment and Institutional Investor Behavior in the Spot Market: The Emerging Market in Taiwan

This paper investigates whether and how futures market sentiment and stock market returns heterogeneously affect the trading activities of institutional investors in the spot market in Taiwan. Our empirical results suggest that foreign investors are net sellers whenever futures market sentiment is bullish and net buyers when investor sentiment is bearish. The two types of domestic institutional investors have poor sentiment timing abilities and the price-pressure effect may account for the behavioral differences among institutional investors. In addition, all three institutional investors are momentum traders. Nevertheless, the momentum trading of foreigners is consistent with an information-based model and that of two local institutional investors, as behavior-based models suggest. This indicates that the same trading momentum strategy can lead to different outcomes for different investors, and both information- and behavior-based momentum trading can exist contemporaneously in the Taiwanese stock market.     

Positive Feedback Trading and Investor Sentiment

This article examines how investor sentiment affects positive feedback trading behavior. By analyzing the daily closing total return of CSI 300 index and its individual returns of stocks, we find that relatively high or low sentiment induces active positive feedback trading. With a specific indicator of sentiment, we explain the microstructure setting of the relationship between positive feedback trading and sentiment. We adopt the classical feedback model from Sentana and Wadhwani (1992) to measure positive feedback trading behavior. By adding sentiment factor to the model, we successfully explain how sentiment influences the behavior of both feedback traders and rational investors. The empirical findings suggest that positive feedback traders are more likely to trade when the prices of most securities move forward together. When the sentiment of feedback traders is at an intermediate level, the feedback trading behavior is insignificant.     

Institutional Traders' Behavior in an Emerging Stock Market: Empirical Evidence on Polish Pension Fund Investors

Abstract:   In this paper, we contribute to the literature on institutional herding and feedback trading by analysing the investment behavior of pension funds on the Polish stock market. Pension funds entered into the stock market due to the national pension system reform in 1999, providing a unique opportunity to receive deeper insight into the behavior of institutional investors in an emerging capital market. Our results show that Polish pension fund investors are to a greater extent involved in herd‐like behavior and pursue feedback trading strategies more often than their counterparts in mature markets. This finding is primarily attributed to a stringent investment regulation and high market concentration. We do not detect, however, that trading by the pension funds exerts significant influence on the future stock prices.     

Investor type trading behavior and trade performance: Evidence from the Thai stock market

This paper examines the trading behavior and decomposes the trading performance of foreign, individual and institutional investors as well as proprietary traders in a dynamic emerging stock market, the Stock Exchange of Thailand. Foreign investors follow a positive feedback, momentum strategy and are good short term market timers but have poor security selection performance in poor markets, thus suggesting that they have a macro (market timing) but not a micro (security selection) informational advantage relative to local investors. Institutions and proprietary traders have poor security selection trading performance. Individuals display herding behavior and have fairly good security selection performance, but individual investors appear to compensate proprietary traders for the provision of short term liquidity by proprietary traders, so individuals' security selection gains are canceled out by market timing losses.     

Intraday online investor sentiment and return patterns in the U.S. stock market

We implement a novel approach to derive investor sentiment from messages posted on social media before we explore the relation between online investor sentiment and intraday stock returns. Using an extensive dataset of messages posted on the microblogging platform StockTwits, we construct a lexicon of words used by online investors when they share opinions and ideas about the bullishness or the bearishness of the stock market. We demonstrate that a transparent and replicable approach significantly outperforms standard dictionary-based methods used in the literature while remaining competitive with more complex machine learning algorithms. Aggregating individual message sentiment at half-hour intervals, we provide empirical evidence that online investor sentiment helps forecast intraday stock index returns. After controlling for past market returns, we find that the first half-hour change in investor sentiment predicts the last half-hour S&P 500 index ETF return. Examining users’ self-reported investment approach, holding period and experience level, we find that the intraday sentiment effect is driven by the shift in the sentiment of novice traders. Overall, our results provide direct empirical evidence of sentiment-driven noise trading at the intraday level.     

International equity flows and country funds

This study investigates the relationships between U.S. equity flows in foreign countries and returns of closed-end country funds for emerging Latin American markets, emerging Asian markets and developed markets. The major issues addressed are (1) relationships between flows and fund returns based on two basic models—information contribution and feedback trading effects, (2) the role of volatility in these relationships, and (3) the effects of the Asian crisis. Basic findings include: (1) information contribution (past flows affect returns) and feedback trading arguments (past returns affect flows) are supported; (2) strong evidence is found for the market segmentation argument rather than the investor sentiment argument; (3) there exists strong evidence of significant volatility effects under information contribution and feedback trading; (4) the Asian crisis effects are important but limited to Asian funds.     

Index futures and positive feedback trading: evidence from major stock exchanges

This paper tests the hypothesis that the introduction of index futures has increased positive feedback trading in the spot markets of six industrialized nations. The analysis is based on a model that assumes two different groups of investors, i.e., risk averse expected utility maximizing investors and positive feedback traders. There is evidence consistent with positive feedback trading before the introduction of index futures across all markets under investigation. In the period following the introduction of index futures, there is no evidence supporting the hypothesis that positive feedback trading drives short-term dynamics of stock returns. The possibility that this is due to possible migration of feedback traders from the spot to the futures markets is also tested. The results show no evidence of positive feedback trading in the futures markets. Overall, the findings support the view that futures markets help stabilize the underlying spot markets by reducing the impact of feedback traders and thus attracting more rational investors who make the markets more informationally efficient and thus providing investors with superior ways of managing risk.     

An intertemporal capital asset pricing model with heterogeneous expectations

This paper extends the intertemporal capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) to integrate the heterogeneous trading behavior of three groups of investors; rational utility maximizers, positive feedback, or momentum, traders, and fundamental traders. Using several contemporary fundamental factors to proxy for the latter of these investors’ trading patterns, the interaction of these three groups of investors is explored in the G-7 markets using monthly stock market prices. There is no evidence that positive feedback traders are present in the sample data. Fundamental traders are however observable. This finding suggests that although positive feedback traders may drive stock prices in the short-run, as is typically observed in higher frequency data, fundamental traders likely play a role in pushing prices back to their fundamental value in the longer-run.     

Herding and excessive risk in the American stock market: A sectoral analysis

This paper aims to test whether herding behavior is a driving force of excessive market volatility and increasing bubbles in the US stock market at a sectoral level. Trading volume turnover and investors’ sentiment are ubiquitous factors besides market return to fuel herding movement in most sectors. Our sample covers all listed companies in the American stock market over four major turmoil periods. Granger causality test shows that herding is a vital ingredient to increasing bubbles in some sectors, but not all. Moreover, herding and trading volume have an inhibiting effect on both overall and in-sector market volatility in large markets, as opposed to concentrated markets commonly studied in the literature.     

Locals, foreigners, and multi-market trading of equities: Intraday evidence from Thailand

We study stock market orders and trades in a developing country, Thailand, where foreign ownership limits partially segment local and foreign investors into two distinct markets. Some foreigners forgo voting rights and distributions to trade on the “local board”, while some locals forgo such benefits and pay a price premium to trade on the “foreign board”. Regardless of nationality, these cross-market traders typically submit orders when liquidity is high, fill orders at relatively beneficial prices, exploit patterns in stock prices across markets, display profitable holding-period returns, and enhance price discovery. This suggests that skilled, informed trading that affects market quality does not depend on trader nationality.     

Do foreign institutional investors destabilize China’s A-share markets?

This paper investigates the effect of foreign institutional investors on the stability of Chinese stock markets. Previous literature views this investor group as destabilizing feedback traders. We use the abolition of ownership restrictions on A shares as a natural experiment. There is strong evidence that foreign institutions have a stabilizing effect on Chinese stock markets and contribute to market efficiency. This finding is robust across exchanges, sample periods, size quintiles and alternative model specifications. By contrast, domestic investors appear to engage in positive feedback trading. Our results have important implications for market regulation.     

Speculative dynamics and price behavior in the Shanghai Stock Exchange

This article examines the extent to which the trading behavior of heterogeneous investors manifests in stock price changes of asset portfolios which constitute the Shanghai Stock Exchange. There are three major findings that materialize. Firstly, reliable statistical evidence of a negative relation between the conditional first and second moments of the return distributions of stock prices lends support to the volatility feedback effect. Secondly, ‘feedback’, or momentum-type investors, are not present in this market as is often detected from the daily price changes of other industrialized markets. Finally, trade volume as a proxy for ‘information-driven’ trading suggests that such investors play a statistically significant role in stock price movements. Parameter estimates from this latter group of investors imply that a rise in stock prices from a high volume trading day is more likely than a rise resulting from a low volume trading day.     

Extreme returns: The case of currencies

Financial market crashes can occur even in the absence of news. This paper highlights four properties of price-contingent trading that increase the frequency of such events. Price-contingent trading is common across financial market, since it includes algorithmic trading, technical trading, and dynamic option hedging. The four properties we consider are: (1) high kurtosis in the distribution of order sizes; (2) clustering of trades within the day; (3) clustering of trades at certain prices; and (4) feedback between trading and returns. The paper estimates the relative importance of these factors using data from the foreign exchange market. Calibrated simulations indicate that interactions among these factors are at least as important as any single one. Among individual factors, the orders’ size distribution and feedback effects have the strongest influence. Overall, price-contingent trading could account for half of realized excess kurtosis. The paper suggests that extreme returns unaccompanied by news are statistically inevitable in the presence of price-contingent trading.