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.     

我国投资者情绪与股票收益实证研究

根据投资者情绪是股票价格形成重要影响因素这一研究观点,围绕投资者情绪是否构成系统性风险及其对不同类型股票的差异化影响,运用我国股市交易数据进行的实证研究结果表明,投资者情绪不构成股市的系统性风险,但对不同市值的股票有着差异化的影响,随着股票的"投机性"增加,投资者情绪对其影响也增大.此外,投资者情绪会削弱股票收益与其波动的正相关性,且对于"投机性"越高的股票,这一影响也越大.     

What's in a “China” Name? A Test of Investor Attention Hypothesis

We study whether a firm's name affects investor attention and firm valuation. Some Chinese firms listed on US stock exchanges have the word “China” included in their company names (“China‐name stocks”), while others do not (“non‐China‐name stocks”). During the 2007 China stock market boom, we find that China‐name stocks significantly outperform non‐China‐name stocks. This is not due to differences in firm characteristics, risk, or liquidity. The “China‐name effect” is largely consistent with the investor attention hypothesis that price pressure caused by increased investor attention on China‐name stocks during the boom period drives up China‐name stocks more than non‐China‐name stocks.     

Connecting two markets: An equilibrium framework for shorts,longs, and stock loans

We analyze a reduced-form framework for understanding the equity loan market's impact on share prices. We show that hard-to-borrow stocks will have distinct return patterns, responding more to shocks in the supply of shares available, and to changes in the heterogeneity of investor beliefs, than other stocks. We conduct two empirical tests in which we find strong support for these equilibrium predictions. In our first test, we take advantage of a tax-driven exogenous shock to share loan supply and find that when supply is reduced around dividend record dates, prices of hard-to-borrow stocks increase 1.1% while prices of easy-to-borrow stocks are unaffected. In our second test, we find that hard-to-borrow stocks have 4.8% lower three-month returns than other stocks, with negative returns concentrated in stocks with high heterogeneity in investor beliefs. Thus, we extend the Diether, Malloy, and Scherbina (2002) result that stocks with a greater dispersion of investor beliefs have lower returns.     

Investor Sentiment and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

We study how investor sentiment affects the cross‐section of stock returns. We predict that a wave of investor sentiment has larger effects on securities whose valuations are highly subjective and difficult to arbitrage. Consistent with this prediction, we find that when beginning‐of‐period proxies for sentiment are low, subsequent returns are relatively high for small stocks, young stocks, high volatility stocks, unprofitable stocks, non‐dividend‐paying stocks, extreme growth stocks, and distressed stocks. When sentiment is high, on the other hand, these categories of stock earn relatively low subsequent returns.     

投资者关注与分析师评级漂移——来自中国股票市场的证据

本文使用一个直接源自于投资者行为的新颖变量——财经互动社区的超额发帖量——作为投资者关注的代理变量,发现投资者关注可以用来解释分析师评级的漂移现象,即针对分析师评级变动,股价的立即反应随着投资者关注的增加而增强,股价的漂移随着投资者关注的增加而减弱,同时发现投资者关注对股票交易量具有显著正向的作用。     

Conservation,Discrimination, and Salvation: Investors’ Social Concerns in the Stock Market

Stocks appear to have investor clienteles based on their business practices and products. The variety in expressive benefits each individual receives from owning controversial stocks causes them to modify their portfolio to accommodate their beliefs. We examine the ownership of firms with social concerns and sin stocks (tobacco, alcohol and gambling). Women tilt their portfolios towards stocks with progressive labor policies for women and minorities. Younger investors avoid companies with poor environmental records but seek companies with progressive labor policies. Democratic voters favor stocks with progressive policies regarding women/minorities and gays/lesbians and are less likely to own sin stocks. Christian objections to homosexuality lead their members to invest less in stocks with progressive labor policies for gays and lesbians. The Christian denominations vary, though, in regard to sin stocks. Catholics are more likely while Mormons are less likely to own a sin stock relative to other investors. Socially responsible investors are clearly not all alike. Social characteristics that are important to one investor may not be important to another socially conscious investor.     

Tax management strategies with multiple risky assets

We study the consumption-portfolio problem in a setting with capital gain taxes and multiple risky stocks to understand how short selling influences portfolio choice with a shorting-the-box restriction. Our analysis uncovers a novel trading flexibility strategy whereby, to minimize future tax-induced trading costs, the investor optimally shorts one of the stocks (or equivalently, buys put options) even when no stock has an embedded gain. Alternatively, an imperfect form of shorting the box can reduce aggregate equity exposure ex post. Given these two short selling strategies, it is common for an unconstrained investor to short some equity while a constrained investor holds a positive investment in all stocks. With no shorting, the benefit of trading separately in multiple stocks is not economically significant.     

Institutions and Individuals at the Turn-of-the-Year

This article evaluates the tax-loss-selling hypothesis against the window-dressing hypothesis as explanations for turn-of-the-year anomalies. We examine differences between securities dominated by individual investors versus those dominated by institutional investors and find that the effect is more pervasive in the former. Controlling for capitalization, we find that in early January (late December), stocks with greater individual investor interest outperform (underperform) stocks with greater institutional investor interest. These results hold for both stocks that previously appreciated in value and stocks that previously depreciated in value. The results are most consistent with the tax-loss-selling hypothesis as an explanation for the turn-of-the-year effect.     

Dumb money: Mutual fund flows and the cross-section of stock returns

We use mutual fund flows as a measure of individual investor sentiment for different stocks, and find that high sentiment predicts low future returns. Fund flows are dumb money–by reallocating across different mutual funds, retail investors reduce their wealth in the long run. This dumb money effect is related to the value effect: high sentiment stocks tend to be growth stocks. High sentiment also is associated with high corporate issuance, interpretable as companies increasing the supply of shares in response to investor demand.     

Stocks for the long run? Evidence from emerging markets

We estimate the myopic (single-period) and intertemporal hedging (long-run) demand for stocks in 20 growth-leading emerging market economies during the 1999–2012 period. We consider two types of investors: a domestic investor who invests in emerging-market assets only (with returns in local currency) and an international investor who invests in both US and emerging-market assets (with returns in US dollars). We establish economically relevant short-run and long-run demand for stocks in several emerging market economies, for both domestic and international investors. From a welfare perspective, however, the myopic demand for emerging-market stocks is much more important than the hedging demand. Further international diversification and foreign currency hedging by the international investor do not alter this conclusion. Hence, for both domestic and international investors emerging-market stocks are mainly assets for the short run.     

Stock mispricing,hard-to-value stocks and the influence of internet stock message boards

In recent years, the predictability of Internet Stock Message Board (ISMB) postings has been intensively investigated. However, the underlying mechanisms driving the ISMB postings and their influence on hard-to-value stocks remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that the information contained in the process underlying ISMB postings contains characteristics that are associated with investor sentiment. In particular, we show that short-term ISMB postings contain persistence in hard-to-value stocks and stocks with high ISMB postings underperform in the long-term. Our empirical findings indicate that ISMB postings proxy reasonably well for firm-specific investor sentiment and are associated with temporary mispricing in stocks.     

首次公开募股(IPO)市场表现及破发影响——基于港市中资股的经验证据

以在港上市中资股2013—2019年的数据为研究样本,首先,基于典型事件分析中资股在境外资本市场的整体表现;然后,采用多元回归模型实证检验破发、市场状况及投资者态度等因素对中资股市场表现的影响。研究结果表明：相较于恒生指数,港市中资股IPO上市后两年内的整体市场表现处于劣势;IPO破发不利于后期市场的表现,破发股的整体市场表现差于非破发股;投资者行为是市场表现的重要影响因素之一,投资者意见分歧会对中资股的市场表现产生正向影响;新股上市前的市场环境越好,中资股IPO上市后的市场表现会越好。     

Investor attention,information acquisition,and value premium: A mispricing perspective

This paper investigates the impact of investor attention on the dynamics of the value premium. We find superior return differences to value-growth strategy conditioned as low degree of investor attention. In contrast, return differences to the value-growth strategy conditioned as high investor attention are indifferent from zero. We show that return differences to low degree of investor attention across value and growth firms are attributed to mispricing explanation using common risk factors, mispricing factors, sentiment analysis, multivariate analysis, and market expectation errors approach. The findings suggest that investor attention contributes to generating superior return differences to standard value-growth strategy. Our finding concludes that long-short investment strategy in value stocks and growth stocks conditioned as low investor attention generate superior value premium.     

Communication and Comovement: Evidence from Online Stock Forums

We study investor communication and stock comovement using a novel data set from an active online stock forum in China. We find substantial comovement among the returns of a stock and its “related stocks,” which are frequently discussed in the subforum dedicated to the given stock. Comovement is greater when the discussion of related stocks is more intensive. Further, the effect of communication on comovement is stronger for stocks associated with higher information uncertainty. Codiscussed stocks are more actively traded and experience more correlated trading. A trading strategy that exploits communication‐driven comovement generates abnormal returns. Our findings highlight the impact of investor communication on asset comovement.     

Retail Investor Sentiment and Return Comovements

Using a database of more than 1.85 million retail investor transactions over 1991–1996, we show that these trades are systematically correlated—that is, individuals buy (or sell) stocks in concert. Moreover, consistent with noise trader models, we find that systematic retail trading explains return comovements for stocks with high retail concentration (i.e., small‐cap, value, lower institutional ownership, and lower‐priced stocks), especially if these stocks are also costly to arbitrage. Macroeconomic news and analyst earnings forecast revisions do not explain these results. Collectively, our findings support a role for investor sentiment in the formation of returns.     

Robust portfolio choice with stochastic interest rates

We determine the optimal investment strategy for an ambiguity-averse investor in a setting with stochastic interest rates. The investor has access to stocks, bonds, and a bank account and he is ambiguous about the expected rate of return of both bonds and stocks. The investor can have different levels of ambiguity aversion about the two types of risky assets. We find that it is more important to take model uncertainty about the stock dynamics than model uncertainty about the bond dynamics into account. Furthermore, the investor’s ambiguity increases his hedging demand. Consequently, the bond/stock ratio increases with his ambiguity and implies less extreme positions in the bank account. Altogether, our model yields portfolio allocations which are more in line with what is implementable in practice. Finally, we demonstrate that neglecting model uncertainty implies significant losses for the investor.     

Short-sale constraints and the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle: An event study approach

Using three natural experiments, we test the hypothesis that investor overconfidence produces overpricing of high idiosyncratic volatility stocks in the presence of binding short-sale constraints. We study three events: IPO lockup expirations, option introductions, and the 2008 short-sale ban on financial firms. Consistent with our prediction, we show that when short-sale constraints are relaxed, event stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility tend to experience greater price reductions, as well as larger increases in trading volume and short interest, than those with low idiosyncratic volatility. These results hold when we benchmark event stocks with non-event stocks with comparable idiosyncratic volatility. Overall, our findings suggest that biased investor beliefs and binding short-sale constraints contribute to idiosyncratic volatility overpricing.     

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.     

投资者关注度与股票市场——以PM2.5概念股为例

近年来雾霾成为中国社会的热点话题,而雾霾频发导致PM2.5概念股受到投资者广泛的关注。本文结合现实环境问题,研究投资者通过对环境的关注度继而对与环境相关的股票的影响。具体而言,本文探究投资者对雾霾和PM2.5概念股的关注度对PM2.5概念股的影响。分析发现投资者对雾霾和PM2.5概念股的关注度的增加能拉升PM2.5概念股的股价。投资者对雾霾的关注度和PM2.5概念股的收益率显著正相关。关注度的增加同时也提高PM2.5概念股交易的活跃程度以及PM2.5概念股涨停的可能性。此外,本文发现正面的新闻报道会拉升PM2.5概念股的股价而负面的新闻报道会降低其股价。最后,本文通过讨论内生性和异质性等一系列稳健性检验进一步验证上述结论。