Is it a Low or a High Price Anomaly? The Curious Case of the Polish Stock Market

Abstract

This study investigates the low-price effect on the Polish stock market. By adopting sorting, cross-sectional tests and checks of the monotonic relation, we have examined the performance of the portfolios formed on the prices of over 850 companies listed on the Polish stock market within the years 2000-2014. Contrary to the globally prevailing evidence, the expensive stocks have significantly outperformed the cheap stocks. Additional sorts on value, size and momentum may be used further to improve the price-based strategies while the strongest anomaly has been identified among the growth companies. We hypothesize that the reverse character of the low-price anomaly may be explained by the impact of another phenomena: the underperformance of lottery-stocks. With the exception of the growth stocks, the reverse low-price effect is no longer significant after the exclusion of NewConnect companies. Finally, by adopting an alternative methodology, we have provided convincing out-of-sample evidence in support of the hypothesis of Baker et al. (2009) stating that corporate managers cater to investors by splitting their company shares in response to time-varying catering incentives.