Googlization and Retail Investors’ Trading Activity

Abstract

Building on Barber and Odean (2008), a growing body of papers document a positive relationship between Google Search Volume Index (SVI) and equity market returns. Such findings suggest that increased attention is combined with a buying pressure that subsequently results in positive returns. This relationship has been established at the market level. In this paper, we focus on a sample of retail investors and use SVI to test whether their aggregate (signed) trading activity is related to attention as well. We find that the relationship between SVI and our retail investors’ trading activity is positive, even when controlling for some socio-demographics or subjective investor characteristics. However, this relationship is not stronger for purchases than for sales, thereby providing no support for the buying pressure hypothesis. We also document a bi-directional causality between attention and trading activity, although the contemporaneous effects are economically stronger and predominate. Our results are robust to different measures of attention and trading activity.