Does good luck make people overconfident? Evidence from a natural experiment in the stock market

This paper examines the changes in investors' trading behavior after winning an IPO allotment in China—a purely luck-driven event. We find that these investors subsequently become overconfident: They trade more frequently and lose more money relative to other investors. This effect is stronger when investors are inexperienced and when investors' pre-existing level of overconfidence is low. We also show that investors exhibit a stronger gambling propensity and hold more lottery-like stock after winning an IPO allotment. Our findings are not explained by wealth effects or house money effects. Overall, our evidence indicates that the experience of good luck makes people overconfident about their prospects.     

Are investors consistent in their trading strategies? An examination of individual investor-level data

While it has been demonstrated that momentum or contrarian trading strategies can be profitable in a range of institutional settings, less evidence is available concerning the actual trading strategies investors adopt. Standard definitions of momentum or contrarian trading strategies imply that a given investor applies the same strategy to both their buy and sell trades, which need not be the case. Using investor-level, transaction-based data from China, where tax effects are neutral, we examine investors' buy-sell decisions separately to investigate how past returns impact differentially on the trading strategies investors adopt when buying and selling stock. After controlling for a wide range of stock characteristics, extreme price changes and portfolio value, a clear asymmetry in trading is observed; with investors displaying momentum behavior when buying stocks, but contrarian behavior when selling stocks. This asymmetry in behavior is not driven purely by reactions to stock characteristics or extreme stocks. We discuss behavioral and cultural explanations for our findings.     

Expected Mispricing: The Joint Influence of Accounting Transparency and Investor Base

We examine how accounting transparency and investor base jointly affect financial analysts' expectations of mispricing (i.e., expectations of stock price deviations from fundamental value). Within a range of transparency, these two factors interactively amplify analysts' expectations of mispricing—analysts expect a larger positive deviation when a firm's disclosures more transparently reveal income‐increasing earnings management and the firm's most important investors are described as transient institutional investors with a shorter‐term horizon (low concentration in holdings, high portfolio turnover, and frequent momentum trading) rather than dedicated institutional investors with a longer‐term horizon (high concentration in holdings, low portfolio turnover, and little momentum trading). Results are consistent with analysts anticipating that transient institutional investors are more likely than dedicated institutional investors to adjust their trading strategies for near‐term factors affecting stock mispricings. Our theory and findings extend the accounting disclosure literature by identifying a boundary condition to the common supposition that disclosure transparency necessarily mitigates expected mispricing, and by providing evidence that analysts' pricing judgments are influenced by their anticipation of different investors' reactions to firm disclosures.     

An empirical evaluation of the overconfidence hypothesis

Recently, several behavioral finance models based on the overconfidence hypothesis have been proposed to explain anomalous findings, including a short-term continuation (momentum) and a long-term reversal in stock returns. We characterize the overconfidence hypothesis by the following four testable implications: First, if investors are overconfident, they overreact to private information and underreact to public information. Second, market gains make overconfident investors trade more aggressively in subsequent periods. Third, excessive trading of overconfident investors in securities markets contributes to the observed excessive volatility. Fourth, overconfident investors underestimate risk and trade more in riskier securities. To document the presence of overconfidence in financial markets, we empirically evaluate these four hypotheses using aggregate data. Overall, we find empirical evidence in support of the four hypotheses.     

Are Happy Investors Likely to Be Overconfident?

This study investigates the relationship of investors' happy sentiment and overconfidence effect. Sunshine, temperature, former returns, and margin loan change rate are used as proxies for happy sentiment. Using data from Taiwan Stock Exchange and principal component analysis, the happy sentiment index is divided into two categories: "natural environment happiness" and "investment atmosphere happiness." The results suggest that when natural environment happiness is stronger, investors are less likely to have overconfidence. On the contrary, when investment atmosphere happiness is stronger, investors are more likely to have overconfidence.     

Trading of foreign investors and stock returns in an emerging market - Evidence from Vietnam

This article investigates the impact of foreign investors' trading on stock returns in Vietnam, a key emerging market. We utilize a time series data set of foreign investors' trading volume and market returns of the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange over an extended time frame before and after global financial crisis. The results indicate that foreign investors are positive feedback traders in Vietnam stock market. The findings also reveal the timing ability and trading strategy of foreign investors. The paper offers strong implications for market participants and portfolio investment.     

Temperature and trading behaviours

It is well known that the weather has an impact on human behaviours. Motivated by the extant literature concerning the positive linear relationship between temperature and investors' trading based on regional data (e.g., Schmittmann et al., 2015), we re-examine the temperature effect by utilizing a dataset that encompasses a large number of individual investors' accounts and a wider range of weather conditions, and construct a comprehensive measure of sensed temperature, Apparent Temperature, which incorporates atmospheric temperature, relative humidity and wind velocity. Our results demonstrate that the relationship between Apparent Temperature and individual investors' purchasing tendency displays an inverted U-shape. At a comfortable temperature, investors are more aggressive and tend to buy more stocks relative to selling. However, the relationship between Apparent Temperature and trading volumes displays a U-shape, suggesting that investors trade less on days when the temperature is comfortable, reducing non-financial opportunity costs. Further, Apparent Temperature displays greater external validity than the three weather conditions when they are examined individually. Our study provides original evidence of non-linearity, instead of the linearity documented by previous research, in the relationships between temperature and retail investors' trading behaviours. Our findings contribute to the literature regarding the weather-induced sentiment misattribution of a diversity of investors.     

Tax Arbitrage and the Existence of Equilibrium Prices for Financial Assets

In models where both investors and securities are subject to differential taxation, there may be no set of prices that rule out infinite gains to trade, or “tax arbitrage.” This paper characterizes the joint restrictions on financial-asset returns and investors' tax schedules that preclude tax arbitrage in the absence of short-sale constraints. The authors show that, if there exists any configuration of marginal tax rates on investors' tax schedules that rule out infinite gains to trade, then “no-tax-arbitrage” prices will exist. They also show that the existence of “no-tax-arbitrage” prices ensures the existence of equilibrium prices.     

A logit model of retail investors' individual trading decisions and their relations to insider trades

Among the various external information sources that influence individual investors' trading decisions, no research has considered the important influence of insiders' transactions. Retail investors might copy the behavior demonstrated by insiders' trading; therefore, this study establishes an approach to estimate the buying probability for a certain stock by a certain investor at a certain point in time and analyzes whether insider trade reports influence this probability. Using a sample of more than 270,000 retail trades in Germany between 2008 and 2009, along with more than 3000 insider trades in the same period, we find evidence of copying of insiders' trades by retail investors. The basic mimicry hypothesis holds, even when we consider an information event hypothesis and an insider attention effect hypothesis as alternative explanations. A robustness test also supports the findings.     

Attention Spillover in Asset Pricing

Exploiting a screen display feature whereby the order of stock display is determined by the stock's listing code, we lever a novel identification strategy and study how the interaction between overconfidence and limited attention affect asset pricing. We find that stocks displayed next to those with higher returns in the past two weeks are associated with higher returns in the future week, which are reverted in the long run. This is consistent with our conjectures that investors tend to trade more after positive investment experience and are more likely to pay attention to neighboring stocks, both confirmed using trading data.     

Market discipline or rent extraction: Impacts of share trading by foreign institutional investors in different corporate governance and investor protection environments

Minority investors' reliance on market discipline can vary with different country-level investor protection and firm-level corporate governance environments, which affect both discipline and rent extraction incentives of foreign institutional investors (FIIs). Using data from 47 economies between 2009 and 2017, we find that firm value increases with FIIs aggressive trading but decreases with FIIs discreet trading. The positive and negative impacts of FIIs trading are strengthened when investor protection is stronger, but weakened when corporate governance is stronger. Our analysis enhances understanding of trade-offs of FIIs trading between discipline and rent extraction in different corporate governance and investor protection environments.     

A Theory of Noise Trading in Securities Markets

In a recent article, Black 1 introduces a type of trading that he terms noise trading. He asserts that noise trading, which he defines as trading on noise as if it were information, must be a significant factor in securities markets. However, he does not provide an explanation of why any investors would rationally want to engage in noise trading. The goal of this paper is to provide such an explanation for one type of investor, managers of investment funds. As shown here, the incentive for a manager to engage in noise trading arises because of the positive signal that the level of the manager's trading provides about his or her ability to collect private information concerning current and potential investments. If the manager's compensation is directly related to investors' perceptions of his or her ability, the manager will then trade more frequently than is justified on the basis of his or her private information. In addition to providing this explanation for noise trading, the results of this analysis may also be useful for further empirical exploration of the relation between investment fund portfolio turnover and subsequent performance.     

Bookbuilding vs. fixed price revisited: The effect of aftermarket trading

Investors who possess information about the value of an IPO can participate in the offering as well as trade strategically in the aftermarket. Both the bookbuilding and the fixed price IPO selling methods require more underpricing when aftermarket trading by informed investors is considered. Bookbuilding becomes especially costly, since the potential for profit in the aftermarket adversely affects investors' bidding behavior in the premarket. Unless the underwriter can restrict its bookbuilding effort to a small enough subset of the informed investors, a fixed price strategy that allocates the issue to retail investors produces higher proceeds on average, contrary to the conventional wisdom in the literature. We therefore find a benefit to limiting access to the premarket and, hence, provide an efficiency rationale for the practice by American bankers of marketing IPOs to a select group of investors. We also provide unique policy and empirical implications.     

Institutional investor’ proportions and inactive trading

We focus on a typical market anomaly-inactive trading: trading volume shrinks while stock price abnormally jumps. We calibrate a theoretical model with variance ambiguity heterogeneous among investors and illustrate that ambiguity averse investors' proportions enhance trading volume shrinkage and abnormal price jumps. We provide a cross-section analysis of stocks' inactive trading by introducing institutional investors' proportions to measure investor structures' differences among stocks. We also empirically measure relative inactive trading for constituent stocks in S&P 500 from 2014 to 2019 and demonstrate that institutional investors' proportion is negatively related to inactive trading. Finally, we demonstrate that higher proportions of institutional investors lead to less inactive trading anomalies.     

Do Individual Investors Have Asymmetric Information Based on Work Experience?

Using a novel data set covering all individual investors' stock market transactions in Norway over 10 years, we analyze whether individual investors have a preference for professionally close stocks, and whether they make excess returns on such investments. After excluding own‐company stock holdings, investors hold 11% of their portfolio in stocks within their two‐digit industry of employment. Given the poor hedging properties of such investments, one would expect abnormally high returns. In contrast, all estimates of abnormal returns are negative, in many cases statistically significant. Overconfidence seems the most likely explanation for the excessive trading in professionally close stocks.     

THE EFFECT OF CROSS‐LISTING ON TRADING VOLUME: REDUCING SEGMENTATION VERSUS SIGNALING INVESTOR PROTECTION

We examine the relation between cross‐listing on the U.S. and UK regulated and unregulated exchanges and trading volume for a sample of 500 foreign firms from 34 countries. We find that the increase in trading volume is a function of both reducing segmentation and signaling investor protection. In addition, we find that home market trading volume, firm size, firm returns, and analyst forecast accuracy are the major determinants of a firm's trading volume. We also show that U.S. and UK investors trade foreign securities that originate from low‐investor‐protection countries more than they trade those from high‐investor‐protection countries, which is consistent with the bonding hypothesis.     

Feedback trading in retail-dominated assets: Evidence from the gold bullion coin market

Although investors' behaviour in gold investments has been widely researched, no study to date has investigated it in the gold bullion coin market, despite the fact that the latter is dominated by retail investors, who are traditionally prone to noise trading. We present seminal empirical evidence on this issue by examining feedback trading in the Krugerrand's secondary market on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange for the March 1996 – August 2019 period. We also assess whether feedback trading interacts with variables relevant to the coin's valuation and the impact of the global financial crisis over those interactions. Positive feedback trading is present for the full sample period, before and during the crisis, interacting significantly with a variety of factors related to Krugerrand's pricing, yet dissipates post crisis, likely due to enhanced foreign demand that catapulted the coin's value, rendering it less easy to trade for South African retail investors. The above imply that Krugerrand-investors should be focusing less on historical price trends and devote more attention to the coin's global demand instead.     

Lifting the Veil: An Analysis of Pre-trade Transparency at the NYSE

We study pre‐trade transparency by looking at the introduction of NYSE's OpenBook service that provides limit‐order book information to traders off the exchange floor. We find that traders attempt to manage limit‐order exposure: They submit smaller orders and cancel orders faster. Specialists' participation rate and the depth they add to the quote decline. Liquidity increases in that the price impact of orders declines, and we find some improvement in the informational efficiency of prices. These results suggest that an increase in pre‐trade transparency affects investors' trading strategies and can improve certain dimensions of market quality.     

All Guts,No Glory: Trading and Diversification among Online Investors

I explore cross‐sectional portfolio performance in a sample containing 324,736 transactions conducted by 16,831 Swedish investors at an Internet discount brokerage firm during the period May 1999 to March 2002. On average, investors hold undiversified portfolios, show a strong preference for risk, and trade aggressively. I measure performance using a panel data model, and explain the cross‐sectional variation using investors' turnover, portfolio size and degree of diversification. I find that turnover is harmful to performance due to fees, and is therefore more predominant among investors with small portfolios. I argue that the degree of diversification is a proxy for investor skill, and it has a separate and distinct positive effect on performance. Investors underperform the market by about 8.5% per year on average, of which half can be attributed to trading costs.     

From Implicit to Explicit: The Impact of Disclosure Requirements on Hidden Transaction Costs

This paper provides evidence that disclosing corporate bond investors' transaction costs (markups) affects the size of the markups. Until recently, markups were embedded in the reported transaction price and not explicitly disclosed. Without explicit disclosure, investors can estimate their markups using executed transaction prices. However, estimating markups imposes information processing costs on investors, potentially creating information asymmetry between unsophisticated investors and bond‐market professionals. We explore changes in markups after bond‐market professionals were required to explicitly disclose the markup on certain retail trade confirmations. We find that markups decline for trades that are subject to the disclosure requirement relative to those that are not. The findings are pronounced when constraints on investors' information processing capacity limit their ability to be informed about their markups without explicit disclosure.