Institutional trading and share returns

Using a unique database of daily transactions from Australian equity managers, we investigate the relation between institutional trading and share returns. The 34 institutional investors included in our sample exhibit a statistically and economically significant ability to predict large capitalization share returns for the ten days following their trades. Detailed analysis indicates that investment manager style is important in understanding the link between institutional trading and stock returns. The contemporaneous relation between institutional trading and returns depends on trade size, broker use, and investment style. We find growth-oriented managers are momentum traders, while style-neutral and value managers are contrarian.     

Caught on tape: Institutional trading,stock returns,and earnings announcements

Many questions about institutional trading can only be answered if one tracks high-frequency changes in institutional ownership. In the United States, however, institutions are only required to report their ownership quarterly in 13-F filings. We infer daily institutional trading behavior from the “tape”, the Transactions and Quotes database of the New York Stock Exchange, using a sophisticated method that best predicts quarterly 13-F data from trades of different sizes. We find that daily institutional trades are highly persistent and respond positively to recent daily returns but negatively to longer-term past daily returns. Institutional trades, particularly sells, appear to generate short-term losses—possibly reflecting institutional demand for liquidity—but longer-term profits. One source of these profits is that institutions anticipate both earnings surprises and post-earnings announcement drift. These results are different from those obtained using a standard size cutoff rule for institutional trades.     

Institutional investor sentiment and aggregate stock returns

This paper examines the equity market return predictability of institutional investor sentiment, in comparison to individual investor sentiment. Our findings suggest that institutional traders are informed and that their sentiment helps to tilt stock prices towards the intrinsic value. This is because the sentiment of institutions encompasses news regarding expectations on future cash flows of underlying firms that impounds itself into future price expectations. In this study, we add to the large number of studies that investigate the role and implications of investor sentiment, which has long been viewed as a pure behavioural phenomenon, on market efficiency and price discovery.     

Institutional stock trading on loan market information

One of the most important developments in the corporate loan market over the past decade has been the growing participation of institutional investors. As lenders, institutional investors routinely receive private information about borrowers. However, most of these investors also trade in public securities. This leads to a controversial question: Do institutional investors use private information acquired in the loan market to trade in public securities? This paper examines the stock trading of institutional investors whose portfolios also hold loans. Using the Securities and Exchange Commission filings of loan amendments, we identify institutional investors with access to private information disclosed during loan amendments. We then look at abnormal returns on subsequent stock trades. We find that institutional participants in loan renegotiations subsequently trade in the stock of the same company and outperform trades by other managers and trades in other stocks by approximately 5.4% in annualized terms.     

Weather and intraday patterns in stock returns and trading activity

We examine the relation between weather in New York City and intraday returns and trading patterns of NYSE stocks. While stock returns are found to be generally lower on cloudier days, cloud cover has a significant influence on stock returns only at the market open. There are significantly more seller-initiated trades when there is more cloud cover at the market open, which is consistent with the return results. Cloudy skies are associated with higher volatility and less market depth over the entire trading day. Finally, cloud cover is not significantly correlated with spread measures and turnover ratios. The findings overall suggest that weather has a significant influence on investors’ intraday trading behavior.     

Revisiting the empirical linkages between stock returns and trading volume

This paper investigates whether the empirical linkages between stock returns and trading volume differ over the fluctuations of stock markets, i.e., whether the return–volume relation is asymmetric in bull and bear stock markets. Using monthly data for the S&P 500 price index and trading volume from 1973M2 to 2008M10, strong evidence of asymmetry in contemporaneous correlation is found. As for a dynamic (causal) relation, it is found that the stock return is capable of predicting trading volume in both bear and bull markets. However, the evidence for trade volume predicting returns is weaker.     

Information,trading and stock returns: Lessons from dually-listed securities

This paper compares the intra-day patterns on the NYSE and AMEX of volatility, trading volume and bid-ask spreads for European and Japanese dually-listed stocks with American stocks of comparable average trading volume and volatility. It is shown that the intra-day patterns for these stocks are remarkably similar even though public information flows differ markedly across these stocks during the trading day. In the early morning, all stocks have higher volatility than later in the day, but this phenomenon is most pronounced for Japanese stocks and affects American stocks the least. We argue that these patterns are consistent with markets reacting to the overnight accumulation of public information but are inconsistent with the view that early morning volatility can be attributed to monopolistic specialist behavior.     

Institutional trading,investor sentiment,and lottery-like stock preferences

This paper explores the time-varying institutional investor preference for lottery-like stocks. On average, institutional investor holdings reflect an aversion to lottery-like stocks. However, I find that an institutions’ aversion to lottery-like stocks is reduced when investor sentiment is low. Moreover, I find that during low sentiment periods, institutional investors have abnormally high trading profits in more positively skewed stocks. These results suggest that institutions reduce their aversion toward lottery-like stocks during low sentiment periods to profitably trade in lottery-like stocks.     

Insider trading and future stock returns in firms with concentrated ownership levels

We investigate the relationship between insider trading and stock returns in firms with concentrated ownership. To this end, we employ data from East Asian countries which span the period January 2003 to May 2012. Consistent with the previous literature, we find a significantly negative relation between the selling activity of insiders and stock returns. However, contrary to studies which focus on highly developed markets, we find that the buying activity of insiders is also inversely related to future stock returns. Our analysis shows that top directors with higher ownership levels drive this result, suggesting that the trading activity of insiders is not always associated with profit-making motives and can be explained by their level of ownership. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a trading strategy which focuses solely on purchases made by top directors with high ownership levels yields negative returns. The paper has important implications for outside investors who mimic the trading activity of insiders with the aim to realise profits.     

The interaction between foreigners' trading and stock market returns in emerging Europe

This paper presents the first comprehensive study of foreigners' trading in European emerging stock markets, using complete data compiled at the destination. We also compare European results to Asia, to which available evidence is mainly confined. The findings provide new insight on foreigners' trading: in addition to rebalancing, risk appetite and global information are global drivers of net foreign flows. Foreigners' negative-feedback-trade with respect to local returns at longer horizons. They do so with an asymmetry: they sell following increases but do not buy following declines. Net foreign flow persistence decreases with local return volatility.     

Effect of auditing: Evidence from variability of stock returns and trading volume

Although the benefits of auditing are uncontroversial in developed markets,there is scant evidence about its effect in emerging economies.Auditing derives its value by increasing the credibility of financial statements,which in turn increases investors’reliance on them in developed markets.Financial statement information is common to all investors and therefore increased reliance on it should reduce divergence in investors’assessment of firm value.We examine the effect of interim auditing on inter-investor divergence with a large sample of listed Chinese firms and find that it decreases more for firms whose reports are audited compared to non-audited firms.This finding suggests that investors rely more on audited financial information.Results of this study are robust to variations in event window length and specification of empirical measures.     

Technical trading rules for nonlinear dynamics of stock returns: evidence from the G-7 stock markets

This paper explores a possible link between an asymmetric dynamic process of stock returns and profitable technical trading rules. Using the G-7 stock market indexes, we show that the dynamic process of daily index returns is better characterized by nonlinearity arising from an asymmetric reverting property. The asymmetric reverting property of stock returns is exploitable in generating profitable buy and sells signals for technical trading strategies. The bootstrap analysis shows that not all nonlinearities generate profitable buy and sell signals, but rather only the nonlinearities generating a consistent asymmetrical pattern of return dynamics can be exploitable for the profitability of the trading rules. The significant positive (negative) returns from buy (sell) signals are a consequence of trading rules that exploit the asymmetric nonlinear dynamics of the stock returns that revolve around positive (negative) unconditional mean returns under prior positive (negative) return patterns. Our results corroborate the arguments for the usefulness of technical trading strategies in stock market investments.     

Institutional investors and stock returns volatility: Empirical evidence from a natural experiment

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the impact of institutional investors on stock market returns dynamics. The Polish pension system reform in 1999 and the associated increase in institutional ownership due to the investment activities of pension funds are used as a unique institutional characteristic. Performing a Markov-switching-GARCH analysis we find empirical evidence that the increase of institutional ownership has temporarily changed the volatility structure of aggregate stock returns. The results are interpretable in favor of a stabilizing effect on index stock returns induced by institutional investors.     

Stock returns,trading volume,and volatility: The case of African stock markets

The presence of the African Stock Markets (ASMs) in the global frontier markets indices confirms their global portfolio diversification role. This study investigates the asymmetric and intertemporal causality among the stock returns, trading volume, and volatility of eight ASMs. Results based on the linear model reveal that return generally Granger cause trading volume. However, evidence from the quantile regression shows that lagged trading volume has a negative causal effect on returns at low quantiles and positive causal effects at high quantiles. This evidence is consistent with volume-return equilibrium models, disposition and overconfidence models, and information asymmetry models. The positive causal effects of volatility on volume support the dispersion of beliefs model. In contrast, intertemporal evidence of contemporaneous and lagged causal relationships from trading volume to volatility supports the mixture of distribution hypothesis, sequential information acquisition hypothesis, and dynamic efficient market hypothesis. Volume-return and return-volume causality dynamics are quantile-specific and therefore driven by market conditions. However, the volume-volatility causality is dependent on volatility regimes. The linear model results confirm how model misspecification can distort and even reverse empirical evidence relative to nonlinear models.     

Speculative trading and stock returns: A stochastic dominance analysis of the Chinese A-share market

The pricing of A-shares in China has long puzzled financial economists. This paper applies recent tests of stochastic dominance (SD) to examine whether differences in the return distributions of A- and B-shares in China are consistent with market efficiency. As SD is nonparametric, market efficiency can be examined without the joint test problem arising from misspecifications in the asset pricing benchmark. Our results show A-shares have second-order dominated B-shares from 1996 to 2005. This dominance was most significant during the market segmentation period, but has continued, albeit to a lesser extent even after the B-share market was opened to local investors in 2001. Our results are robust to using residual returns from an international asset pricing model instead of raw returns. We conclude that the superior performance of A-shares cannot be attributed to risk. The results are more likely due to a return bias caused by intense speculation among retail individuals under limited arbitrage.     

Optimal stock trading with personal taxes: Implications for prices and the abnormal January returns

The tax law confers upon the investor a timing option - to realize capital losses and defer capital gains. With the tax rate on long term gains and losses being about half the short term rate, the law provides a second timing option - to realize losses short term and gains long term, if at all. Our theory and simulation over the 1962–1977 period establish that taxable investors should realize long term gains in high variance stocks and repurchase stock in order to realize potential future losses short term. Tax trading does not explain the small-firm anomaly but predicts a seasonal pattern in trading volume which maps into a seasonal pattern in stock prices, the January anomaly, only if investors are irrational or ignorant of the price seasonality.     

Predicting stock returns

This paper studies whether incorporating business cycle predictors benefits a real time optimizing investor who must allocate funds across 3,123 NYSE-AMEX stocks and cash. Realized returns are positive when adjusted by the Fama-French and momentum factors as well as by the size, book-to-market, and past return characteristics. The investor optimally holds small-cap, growth, and momentum stocks and loads less (more) heavily on momentum (small-cap) stocks during recessions. Returns on individual stocks are predictable out-of-sample due to alpha variation, whereas the equity premium predictability, the major focus of previous work, is questionable.     

Estimating the effects of information surprises and trading on stock returns using a mixed jump-diffusion model

I present a methodology that uses the mixed jump diffusion modelfor stock returns to estimate the separate effects of informationsurprises and strategic trading around corporate events. Usingsimulation techniques, I show that for events with multipleannouncements spread over a long time, the estimators derivedfrom the mixed jump-diffusion model are more powerful comparedto the traditional cumulative abnormal return estimators. Thenew methodology is used to study the separate effects of informationsurprises and strategic trading associated with block holdingsand subsequent targeted repurchases. I find that for more than93 percent of the firms in our sample the mixed jump-diffusionmodel is statistically superior to the pure diffusion modelin describing stock returns. More important, I find a statisticallysignificant negative effect due to trading while the averageeffect around announcements is statistically insignificant.In contrast, the standard cumulative abnormal return is notstatistically different from zero.     

Innovative efficiency and stock returns

We find that innovative efficiency (IE), patents or citations scaled by research and development expenditures, is a strong positive predictor of future returns after controlling for firm characteristics and risk. The IE-return relation is associated with the loading on a mispricing factor, and the high Sharpe ratio of the Efficient Minus Inefficient (EMI) portfolio suggests that mispricing plays an important role. Further tests based upon attention and uncertainty proxies suggest that limited attention contributes to the effect. The high weight of the EMI portfolio return in the tangency portfolio suggests that IE captures incremental pricing effects relative to well-known factors.