When fund management skill is more valuable?

Does fund management skill allow managers to identify mispriced securities more accurately and thereby make better portfolio choices resulting in superior fund performance when noise trading – a natural setting to detect skill – is more prevalent? We find skilled fund managers with superior past performance to generate persistent excess risk‐adjusted returns and experience significant capital inflows, especially in high sentiment times, high stock dispersion, and economic expansion states when price signals are noisier. This pattern persists after we control for lucky bias, using the ‘false discovery rate’ approach, which permits disentangling manager ‘skill’ from ‘luck.’     

How Does the Change in Investor Sentiment over Time Affect Stock Returns?

We examine how the change in investor sentiment (IS) over time (the IS trend) affects stock returns. The turnover rates of trading shares, trading value, and transactions, three market measures of trading activity, have been demonstrated to meet the psychometric criteria for measuring the IS trend. The ratio of market price to book value and the short-selling turnover ratio are inappropriate proxies. The empirical results indicate that the influence of the IS trend on returns depends on the direction of the trend (optimistic or pessimistic) and stock characteristics of individual holdings and on arbitrage constraint. The effectiveness of arbitrage, sentiment-driven mispricing, and market intervention are discussed.     

The Information Content of Australian Managed Fund Ratings

Abstract:  We examine the information content of managed fund ratings for Australian retail investors. Because fund ratings, premised on a quantitative-qualitative model, are highly transitory, we question whether investors formulate their investment decisions with respect to changes in ratings and whether ratings, in turn, react to fund flows. We find that information regarding fund flows can be obtained from ratings, and that rating changes can have far-reaching effects. Investors flock to newly upgraded funds while they penalize those that have been downgraded by withdrawing funds. Investors are constantly anticipating ratings revisions, particularly downgrades, and we attribute this phenomenon to the role of qualitative factors in the ratings.     

投资者关注与股价崩盘风险:抑制还是加剧?

本文以2010—2017年中国A股上市公司为样本,考察了投资者关注影响股价崩盘风险的客观表现和传导路径。研究发现,投资者关注度的提高会显著加剧下一期的股价崩盘风险,存在“关注度的崩盘效应”;分组检验发现,关注度的崩盘效应仅在机构持股比例低的公司和市场处于牛市状态下存在;路径检验发现,投资者关注不存在信息路径,没有改善公司信息透明度,但存在部分的情绪路径,提高了股价同步性和投资者情绪,从而加剧了股价崩盘风险。建议监管部门重视投资者关注对股价带来的冲击,通过进一步提高机构者持股比例,缓解情绪过热导致的定价错误程度,降低股价崩盘风险。     

Revisiting the ICAPM under the distortion of risk–return tradeoff in short-horizon stock returns

We suggest that the distortion of the positive risk–return relation in the ICAPM is a consequence of trading by informed investors to exploit mispricing. We hypothesize and demonstrate that a non-positive (strongly positive) risk–return relation following positive (negative) market returns is attributed to short-selling (purchasing) of overpriced (underpriced) stocks along with optimistic (pessimistic) expectations conditional on good (bad) market news. We verify this asymmetry in the risk–return relation through the indirect risk–return relation conditional on good (bad) market news. We also find that the attenuation (reinforcement) of the positive risk–return relation is more profound in high- (low-) sentiment periods.     

投资者情绪对股价联动的影响--基于中国证券市场的实证研究

分别从个股层面以及市场层面探讨投资者情绪对中国证券市场股价联动现象的影响。实证揭示：（1）中国证券市场存在显著的股价联动效应。（2）投资者情绪对股价联动现象存在显著的负向影响。（3）个股层面的投资者情绪变量对股价联动的影响大于市场层面的综合情绪变量。（4）投资者情绪对不同行业的股价联动的影响存在差异。     

Japan and Hong Kong Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs): Discounts, Returns, and Trading Strategies

Foreign exchange-traded funds (ETFs) trade on U.S. exchanges but provide broad exposure to foreign markets. ETFs are designed to minimize the deviation between price and value of the underlying securities. However, nonoverlapping trading hours between the United States and many foreign markets inhibit this mechanism. The data for Japan and Hong Kong iShares show that deviations exist between the ETF price and the value of the underlying securities. The deviations are positively related to subsequent ETF returns creating potential profit opportunities. A simple trading rule based on this observation produces impressive gross returns when compared to a buy-and-hold strategy.     

Investor Sentiment and Stock Returns: Evidence from Turkey

This paper investigates the relation between investor sentiment and stock returns on the Istanbul Stock Exchange, employing vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis and Granger causality tests. The sample period extends from July 1997 to June 2005. In the VAR models, stock portfolio returns and investor sentiment proxies are used as endogenous variables. Two dummy variables accounting for natural and economic crises are used as exogenous variables. The analysis results suggest that, excepting shares of equity issues in aggregate issues, stock portfolio returns seem to affect all investor sentiment proxies, namely closed-end fund discount, mutual fund flows, odd-lot sales-to-purchases ratio, and repo holdings of mutual funds. Investor sentiment does not appear to forecast future stock returns; only the turnover ratio of the stock market seems to have forecasting potential.     

投资者情绪与中国股票市场过度波动

本文分析中国投资者分类情绪及信心变化与中国股票市场波动的同期及动态影响。实证结果表明:就同期而言,中国投资者对国内经济基本面的信心变化以及中国股票市场波动,将影响投资者对国际经济金融环境的信心;就中长期而言,中国投资者情绪中关于国内经济基本面和国内经济政策的信心变化是影响中国股票市场过度波动的重要原因;中国投资者关于国际经济金融环境的信心深受国内经济基本面的信心变化的影响,中国投资者对A股市场估值的判断,受投资者对A股市场的股票估值信心以及国内经济基本面信心变化影响较大。     

Investor Trading Behavior and Sentiment in Futures Markets

This study investigates the effects of investor trading behavior and investor sentiment on futures market return. We find that the spot investor trading behavior, futures investor trading behavior, spot market sentiment, and futures market sentiment all have positive effects on daily futures returns in Chinese financial market. More importantly, we show that the effect of (spot) futures investor trading behavior has better explanatory power than (spot) futures market sentiment on futures returns. Further supporting our results, high investor trading behavior and high investor sentiment strengthen the positive relation between sentiment-returns and behavior-returns.     

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.     

Chinese institutional investors’ sentiment

We use daily survey data on Chinese institutional investors’ forecasts to measure investors’ sentiment. Our empirical model uncovers that share prices and investor sentiment do not have a long-run relation; however, in the short-run, the mood of investors follows a positive-feedback process. Hence, institutional investors are optimistic when previous market returns were positive. Contrarily, negative returns trigger a decline in sentiment, which reacts more sensitively to negative than positive returns. Investor sentiment does not predict future market movements—but a drop in confidence increases market volatility and destabilizes exchanges. EGARCH models reveal asymmetric responses in the volatility of investor sentiment; however, Granger causality tests reject volatility-spillovers between returns and sentiment.     

投资者非理性行为是动量效应产生的原因吗?——来自互联网金融论坛的证据

动量效应是行为金融研究中重要的市场异象,然而目前各市场因素并不能完全解释其来源。在大数据背景下,本文通过挖掘金融论坛的结构化和非结构化数据,深入研究投资者微观行为与动量效应的关系,发现市值规模、账面市值比和行业等市场因素仅能解释约30%的动量效应,而基于行为金融的投资者非理性因素——投资者情绪、投资者关注度和情绪传播度,都是动量效应形成的重要因素,在市场因素的基础上还能继续解释35%左右的动量效应。研究结论对理解动量效应的形成机制和投资实践中网络信息的价值有重要意义。     

Investor Sentiment Influence on the Risk-Reward Relation in the Taiwan Stock Market

We examine the influence of investor sentiment on the risk-reward relationship in the Taiwan stock market. Regression results show that the risk-reward relationship is weakly positive (significantly negative) under low (high) levels of investor sentiment. Granger causality tests indicate unidirectional, not bidirectional, causal relationships. Moreover, the negative return-variance relationship is more strongly characteristic of the over-the-counter index than of the Taiwan Stock Exchange weighted index, indicating that an unreasonable risk-reward trade-off may be more prevalent in emerging markets than in mature markets. Finally, the Wald test demonstrates that industry effects on the risk-reward relationship may be negligible.