On the buying and selling behaviour of investor categories: evidence from Qatar

Abstract

This study sets out to identify the trading patterns of foreign investors versus those of Qatar's domestic counterparts. Specifically, two chief issues are addressed. First, whether the buyside and sellside behaviours of individual and institutional foreign investor groups are different from those of domestic counterparts; and second, whether the demonstrated trading patterns are persistent over time. To tackle these issues, a multivariate vector autoregression (VAR) is performed. Both daily and weekly frequencies are considered in the analysis. Overall, the results indicate that domestic individual investors tend to pursue contrarian strategies when they buy stocks. On the sellside, they switch their behaviour from contrarian to momentum at longer horizons. Domestic institutional investors act like contrarian traders, whether they buy or sell shares. Foreign institutional investors are momentum buyers but contrarian sellers. Foreign individual investors pursue contrarian buying and momentum selling strategies, irrespective of the data frequency used. Additionally, all investor categories tend to herd when buying/selling stocks. These results provide some practical policy implications.