The effect of risk-taking behavior on profitability: Evidence from futures market

We explore how futures traders make a tradeoff between risk and return by examining their risk-taking in the action. By applying a novel measure to their trade-by-trade transactions to capture their tendency in risk-taking, we find a general tendency to reduce risk-taking by cutting positions when facing losses or gains, and the tendency is stronger in the case of losses. However, great variations exist among traders in the risk-taking tendency and the results for trading are opposite for profitable and unprofitable traders. For the unprofitable, more risk-taking by trading more actively leads to greater losses. This is concrete evidence for the prevailing belief in the literature that trading too much, arguably due to overconfidence, is hazardous to investor's wealth. Contrary to that belief, however, we find fresh evidence that more active trading by the profitable traders leads to greater profits, suggesting their trades are likely based on ability and skills.     

Combining prediction intervals in the M4 competition

The 2018 M4 Forecasting Competition was the first M Competition to elicit prediction intervals in addition to point estimates. We take a closer look at the twenty valid interval submissions by examining the calibration and accuracy of the prediction intervals and evaluating their performances over different time horizons. Overall, the submissions fail to estimate the uncertainty properly. Importantly, we investigate the benefits of interval combination using six recently-proposed heuristics that can be applied prior to learning about the realizations of the quantities. Our results suggest that interval aggregation offers improvements in terms of both calibration and accuracy. While averaging interval endpoints maintains its practical appeal as being simple to implement and performs quite well when data sets are large, the median and the interior trimmed average are found to be robust aggregators for the prediction interval submissions across all 100,000 time series.     

Investor attention,firm-specific characteristic,and momentum: A case of the Korean stock market

This study examines the sources of negative momentum profits by combining investor attention and the properties of common and firm-specific factors. We choose the Korean stock market as a good case to characterize the negative momentum profits identified in Asia. In both portfolio and stock analyses, a method is devised to generate return data involving the property of each common and firm-specific factor within stock groups by investor attention. This study found significant negative momentum profits within the stock group with high investor attention. This momentum effect is highly dependent on the reversed performance of the past loser portfolio, not the continued performance of the past winner portfolio, and this reversal is strongly attributable to the properties of firm-specific factors, and not those of common factors. These results are robustly consistent regardless of changes in empirical design and the consideration of influence factors, market dynamics, and other stock markets.     

信息不对称、过度自信与股价变动

信息传导的非同步和投资者情绪变化是股票市场的两个典型特征,前者会引发投资者之间出现信息不对称问题,后者主要体现为投资者过度自信,两者共同作用影响股票价格变动。本文将信息不对称和投资者过度自信情绪置于同一个分析框架,建立两阶段动态序贯定价理论模型研究现实市场上信息传导过程中股价变动的内在机制。结果表明:(1)面临新信息的进入,投资者对股票收益预期的调整与均衡价格之间具有正相关关系;(2)面临有利消息时,过度自信投资者比例越大,股票的均衡价格越高,投资收益将越低;面临不利消息时则相反;(3)随着过度自信投资者比例以及过度自信程度升高,市场风险溢价将下降;(4)投资者群体在信息传导过程中出现分化,对股价变动形成异质信念,未获取信息和获取信息但未出现过度自信的投资者认为股价被高估,获取信息且出现过度自信的投资者认为价格被低估,促使更多的交易,引发市场成交量和股价变动;(5)过度自信投资者比例与过度自信程度提高均会对市场效率产生正向影响,而对市场深度具有负向效应。最后,基于理论结果对非对称性和持续性等典型的市场波动性特征进行解释。     

Overconfidence and tax avoidance: The role of CEO and CFO interaction

We investigate how overconfident CEOs and CFOs may interact to influence firms’ tax avoidance. We adopt an equity measure to capture overconfident CEOs and CFOs and utilize multiple measures to identify companies’ tax-avoidance activities. We document that CFOs, as CEOs’ business partners, play an important role in facilitating and executing overconfident CEOs’ decisions in regard to tax avoidance. Specifically, we find that companies are more likely to engage in tax-avoidance activities when they have both overconfident CEOs and overconfident CFOs, compared with companies that have other combinations of CEO/CFO overconfidence (e.g., an overconfident CEO with a non-overconfident CFO), which is consistent with the False Consensus Effect Theory. Our study helps investors, regulators, and policymakers understand companies’ decision-making processes with regard to tax avoidance.     

Exogenous and Endogenous Attention and the Convergence of Analysts’ Forecasts

The propensity of the forecasts of sell-side financial analysts to converge (or diverge) is a function of their exogenous and endogenous selective attention and overconfidence. When returns are negative, the endogenous form of selective attention—a static measure of analysts’ goal-driven attention at a particular point in time—has a positive association with convergence. The exogenous form of selective attention—a relatively involuntary dynamic process of exogenous attentional shift driven by external changes in the market over time—is associated with a tendency for forecasts to diverge.     

Overconfidence,risk perception and the risk-taking behavior of finance professionals

This paper highlights the role played by overconfidence and risk perception in the risk-taking behaviors of finance professionals. We interviewed 64 high-level professionals and demonstrate that they are overconfident in both the general and the financial domains. Using a recent measure proposed by Glaser et al. (2013), we indicate that respondents are overconfident in forecasting future stock prices. We demonstrate that the risk they are willing to assume is positively influenced by overconfidence and optimism and negatively influenced by risk perception. However, the stock return volatility anticipated is, in most cases, an insignificant determinant of the risk that professionals are ready to assume.     

Experimental evidence on the ‘insidious’ illiquidity risk

This paper introduces an experiment aiming to investigate the contribution of illiquidity risk to the total risk of a collective investment project. If implemented, the project succeeds with a known probability. Yet the project fails if the quota of investors is not reached in the first place. Hence strategic uncertainty compounds its effect with the “intrinsic risk” of the project. Results confirm the insidious nature of illiquidity: as long as a first collective default does not occur, investors accept high intrinsic risk projects. After a first default, they become extremely prudent and come back to market only gradually. After several defaults, private agents manage to coordinate on a relatively low intrinsic risk above which they refuse to participate in the project. Macroeconomic policy implications follow.     

How (Over) Confident Are Financial Analysts?

Extensive research has been devoted to the quality of analysts' earnings forecasts. The common finding is that analysts' forecasts are not very accurate. Prior studies have tended to focus on the mean of forecasts and measure accuracy using various summaries of forecast errors. The present study sheds new light on the accuracy of analysts' forecasts, by measuring how well calibrated these forecasts are. The authors follow the tradition of calibration studies in psychological literature and measure the degree of calibration by the hit rate. They analyze a year's worth of data from the Institutional Brokers Estimate System database, which includes over 200,000 annual earnings forecasts made by over 6,000 analysts for over 5,000 companies. By using different ways to convert analysts' point estimates of earnings into a range of values, the authors establish the bounds that are necessary to determine the hit rates, and examine to what extent the actual earnings announced by the companies are bracketed by these intervals. These hit rates provide a more complete picture of the accuracy of the forecasts.     

CEO optimism,CEO selection,compensation, and corporate investment decision: The case of CEOs who were rehired as CEOs by another firms after turnover

What happens to CEOs after they are let go by their firm? This study is designed to investigate CEOs who are rehired as CEOs by another firms after turnover. CEOs defined as “moderately optimistic” and those who left voluntarily from their departing firms, are younger, have better prior performance, and work in larger firms are found to have a greater likelihood of being rehired as a CEO by another employer. Moreover, new-hire firms with higher growth opportunity and higher R&D expenditures are found to be significantly more willing to hire overconfident CEOs. Furthermore, more-optimistic CEOs are found to receive higher total compensation from their new-hire firms than CEOs who are less optimistic. Finally, overconfident CEOs working in firms with high growth opportunity and higher R&D show a significantly greater tendency toward increasing firm investment.