Trading Behavior Of Investors Research Articles

Investor Sentiment, Volatility and Stock Return Comovements

We study the stock return comovements from two different perspectives, one being trading behaviour-induced return comovements and the other volatility-induced return comovements. Following Baker and Wurglur (2006), we construct an investor sentiment index and examine whether it has relationship with return comovements induced by investor's trading behaviour and market volatility. We find that a correlated trading behaviour along with investor sentiment significantly determines excess stock returns. Also stocks with high volatility exhibit higher return comovement properties compared to low volatilie stocks. In a cross-sectional framework, we find higher level of market uncertainty characterized by more biased investor sentiment induces highly correlated trading behaviour and thereby generates stronger correlated returns, causing stronger return comovements. The findings from our study imply that irrational and idiosyncratic sentiment of market participants, particularly which of investors, causes significant return comovement.

To See is To Know: Simultaneous Display of Market Data for Retail Investors

I test whether the display format of market data affects the trading performance and behavior of retail investors. To do so, I exploit a large brokerage dataset covering a period during which the market information provided to the broker’s customers changed in format, but not in content. I find that a simultaneous display of cross-stock market data reduces the cognitive cost of monitoring the market and thus helps investors obtain better execution prices. In particular, investors better mitigate non-execution and adverse-selection risks when trading with limit orders. Hence, the display format of market data matters for the individual investor.

Investor response to a natural disaster: Evidence from Japan's 2011 earthquake

Japan's most powerful known earthquake struck at 2:46p.m. on Friday, March 11, 2011. We study the unusual trading behaviors of individual and foreign investors in Japan during the aftermath of this natural disaster. Individual investors typically show contrarian trading patterns, so the sharp downturn in the Nikkei should cause positive net purchases. Instead, purchases were significantly less than sales in the week after the earthquake. Foreign investors typically show positive feedback and momentum trading patterns. However, in the week after the earthquake, they seemed to have stabilized the Japanese stock markets by dramatically increasing their trading activity and net purchases.

Anchoring effect on foreign institutional investors’ momentum trading behavior: Evidence from the Taiwan stock market

On Taiwan's stock market, foreign institutional investors hold over one-third of the total market value and have enjoyed remarkable returns on their investments. Hence, it is important to investigate the trading behavior of foreign institutional investors. Previous studies have found that foreign institutional investors are momentum traders. This study documents a cognitive bias – anchoring effect – on foreign institutional investors’ trading decisions. Moreover, we document that foreign institutional investors’ momentum behavior is influenced (anchored) by prior foreign ownership (anchor). We also show that foreign investors’ momentum behavior is strengthened when prior foreign ownership is high. However, the anchoring effect cannot improve momentum profitability. In some cases, momentum profitability suffers because of the anchoring effect.

Noise trading and stock returns: evidence from China

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the trading behaviors of retail investors and investigate their impacts on stock returns.Design/methodology/approachAs retail investors are considered as the main noise traders in the capital market, using the trading records of Chinese retail investors from 2005 to 2009, the authors study their trading preferences and the correlation of their trades. Then, they use a multifactor model to test whether the co‐movement of stock returns could be explained by individual sentiment.FindingsThe authors' results show that the small‐cap stocks are obviously preferred by retail investors. Meanwhile, the net stock demands of retail investors are systematically correlated, even when the effect of market risk is excluded. In the perspective of the net stock demands, the authors use BSI to measure the individual sentiment, finding that individual sentiment plays an important role in the formation of the cross‐section of stock returns. However, the authors' results imply that BSI is a reverse indicator to predict the future returns, which implies that the trading behaviors of retail investors are irrational.Originality/valueConsistent with behavioral theory, the authors' findings support the viewpoint that stock returns could be affected by the systematic correlated trading of retail investors. To some extent, their findings highlight the need to know more details of individual investors' trading behaviors through which the fluctuations of asset prices can be better understood.

The relationship between information content and institutional investors: evidence from new product preannouncements

In this study, we investigate the relationship between information content of new product preannouncements (NPPAs) and trading behaviors of institutional investors. Using hand-collected data from 1995 to 2004, in empirical results, we find that there is a significantly positive relationship between information content and institutional investors. NPPAs can help institutional investors to evaluate the potential success of forthcoming new products through signaling enough information content. As a result, more information cues and earlier NPPAs can make institutional investors choose these preannouncing firms into their investment portfolios to increase their holdings and attract more different institutional investors to hold these shares of preannouncing firms. In addition, we also find the positive advertising and R&D investment effects. Our findings suggest that managers should use the information content of NPPA signals to reduce information asymmetry and help managers to implement their NPPA strategies so as to receive greater financial support from institutional investors.

Why the Going-Concern Anomaly: Gambling in the Market?

This paper investigates why the market fails to incorporate the adverse information conveyed by the going-concern (GC) opinion in a timely manner. Our main conjecture is that the lottery-like features of GC stocks attract a predominantly retail clientele who use those stocks to gamble in the market. Such trading behavior leads to the underreaction to the GC event and significant downward drift in prices over the following year. Using a sample of first time GC firms from 1993 to 2007 we show that GC stocks have extreme lottery-type characteristics. We further demonstrate that retail investors have a proclivity to be net-buyers of these stocks around the GC event, and such contrarian behavior is directly related to the lottery-like nature of GC firms. Using individual investor-level trading, socioeconomic, and demographic data we confirm that retail investors who are known to have a greater propensity to gamble are more likely to trade GC stocks. We rule out several alternative explanations for our findings, and conclude that gambling-motivated trading behavior of retail investors is the most likely driver of the anomalous short-term market reaction and the associated longer-term market response following the release of going-concern audit opinion.

Individual Investor Trading in Leverage Products - Risk Appetite and Positioning Around Earnings Announcements

We study the trading behavior of individual investors in leverage bank-issued products around earnings announcements. The trading activity increases substantially around earnings announcements. Aggregated individual investor trading is strongly correlated, both pre- and post event. We find intense aggregate positive positioning ahead of earnings announcements, irrespective of the direction of the subsequent earnings surprise. Thus, individual investors are subject to an optimism bias. The risk appetite of individual investors increases in the run-up to earnings announcements. We find that neither pre-event risk appetite nor pre-event imbalances can be attributed to informed trading. We attribute the increased risk appetite to investor overconfidence. Overall, individual investor trading in leverage products is not particularly skillful.

The Behavior of Individual Investors

Abstract We provide an overview of research on the stock trading behavior of individual investors. This research documents that individual investors (1) underperform standard benchmarks (e.g. a low-cost index fund), (2) sell winning investments while holding losing investments (the “disposition effect”), (3) are heavily influenced by limited attention and past return performance in their purchase decisions, (4) engage in naive reinforcement learning by repeating past behaviors that coincided with pleasure while avoiding past behaviors that generated pain, and (5) tend to hold undiversified stock portfolios. These behaviors deleteriously affect the financial well being of individual investors.

(Un)skilled Leveraged Trading of Retail Investors

We study the trading behavior of retail investors in the market of leveraged bank-issued retail derivatives designed to trade excessively, speculate and gamble on ongoing trends and market movements. We analyze whether retail investors have private information and benefit disproportionately or whether they gamble. We answer this question along three dimensions: (i) profitability, (ii) news trading, and (iii) sensitivity to implicit trading costs. We distinguish derivatives by the type of underlying (index vs. individual stocks). We find that raw returns are negative for derivatives with stock as underlying, and only partially positive for those with index as underlying. Nevertheless, risk-adjusted returns show a poor performance with sharpe ratios below one. We show that retail investors are attracted by news, but do not have private information prior to news events. Finally, we categorize investors according to their sensitivity to implicit trading costs. We find that non-sensitive investors perform worse than sensitive investors.

Does Non-Informative Text Affect Investor Behavior?

This paper demonstrates that easily processed texts affect investor trading behavior even in the absence of any informational content. We focus on characteristics of stock tickers and show that stocks with tickers that are actual words in the English language are more liquid, as measured by higher turnover and trading volume, and lower spreads. The preference toward tickers that are words prevails among retail investors, but does not affect institutional investors. This is consistent with the explanation that ticker characteristics facilitate trading by improving the firm’s visibility among retail investors through channels of familiarity and memorization.

Do Institutional Investors Value the 10b-5 Private Right of Action? Evidence from Investor Trading Behavior Following Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd.

In Morrison v. National Australia Bank (2010), the U.S. Supreme Court limited investors’ ability to bring private 10b-5 securities fraud actions to cases where the securities at issue were purchased on a United States stock exchange or were otherwise purchased in the U.S. Because many foreign firms’ securities trade simultaneously on non-U.S. venues and on U.S. exchanges, institutional investors claimed after Morrison that they would look to such firms’ U.S-traded securities to preserve their rights under 10b-5. This article tests this prediction using proprietary trading data from 378 institutional investors. The analysis reveals no evidence that investors reallocated trades in cross-listed issuers to the U.S., nor did they reallocate foreign trading to cross-listed issuers that are now clearly subject to 10b-5 securities suits. This persistence in trading appears across both money managers and pension plan sponsors, notwithstanding sponsors’ more vocal criticism of Morrison and their prominence in 10b-5 litigation.The appendices for this paper are available at the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2537125

Did institutions herd during the internet bubble?

We examine the trading behavior of institutional investors during the internet bubble and crash of 1998–2001, and its impact on stock prices. Similar to some recent findings concerning the trading behavior of hedge funds and NASDAQ 100 stocks, we find that during the bubble all types of institutions herded with great intensity into internet stocks for a comprehensive sample of institutional investors and internet stocks. In addition to this, we present three entirely new results. First, institutional herding was much greater than what can be explained by momentum trading. Second, institutions as a group continued to increase their holdings of internet stocks for two quarters past the market peak during the first quarter of 2000, and three quarters past the peak for individual stock prices, suggesting that institutions were unable to time the price peaks. Finally and most importantly, we find positive abnormal returns contemporaneous with institutional herding and negative abnormal returns (reversals) at the point that herding ceased. This finding suggests that institutions’ trading created temporary price pressures, and may have contributed to the bubble.

Random matrix approach to the dynamics of stock inventory variations

It is well accepted that investors can be classified into groups owing to distinct trading strategies, which forms the basic assumption of many agent-based models for financial markets when agents are not zero-intelligent. However, empirical tests of these assumptions are still very rare due to the lack of order flow data. Here we adopt the order flow data of Chinese stocks to tackle this problem by investigating the dynamics of inventory variations for individual and institutional investors that contain rich information about the trading behavior of investors and have a crucial influence on price fluctuations. We find that the distributions of cross-correlation coefficient Cij have power-law forms in the bulk that are followed by exponential tails, and there are more positive coefficients than negative ones. In addition, it is more likely that two individuals or two institutions have a stronger inventory variation correlation than one individual and one institution. We find that the largest and the second largest eigenvalues (λ1 and λ2) of the correlation matrix cannot be explained by random matrix theory and the projections of investors' inventory variations on the first eigenvector u(λ1) are linearly correlated with stock returns, where individual investors play a dominating role. The investors are classified into three categories based on the cross-correlation coefficients CVR between inventory variations and stock returns. A strong Granger causality is unveiled from stock returns to inventory variations, which means that a large proportion of individuals hold the reversing trading strategy and a small part of individuals hold the trending strategy. Our empirical findings have scientific significance in the understanding of investors' trading behavior and in the construction of agent-based models for emerging stock markets.

Speculation as a Learned Behavior? Evolving Trading Strategies and Implications for Nascent Markets

This study examines how newly recruited investors learn to mimic the trading behaviors of experienced institutional investors in an emerging capital market characterized by policies that incentiviz...

Buying and Selling Behavior of Individual Investors in Option-Like Securities

We analyze the trading behavior of individual investors in option-like securities, namely bank-issued warrants, and thus expand the growing literature of investors behavior to a new kind of securities. A unique data set from a large German discount broker gives us the opportunity to analyze the trading behavior of 1,454 investors, making 89,958 transactions in 6,724 warrants on 397 underlyings. In different logit regression, we make use of the facts that investors can speculate on rising and falling prices of the underlying with call and put warrants and that we also have information about the stock portfolios of the investors. We report several facts about the trading behavior of individual investors in warrants that are consistent with the literature on the behavior of individual investors in the stock market. The warrant investors buy calls and sell puts if the price of the underlying has decreased over the past trading days and they sell calls and buy puts if the price of the underlying has increased. That means, the investors follow negative feedback trading strategies in all four trading categories observed. In addition, we find strong evidence for the disposition effect for call as well as put warrants. The trading behavior is also influenced if the underlying reaches some exceptionally prices, e.g. highs, lows or the strike price. We show that hedging, as one natural candidate to buy puts, does not play an important role in the market for bank-issued warrants. The probability to buy calls is positively related to the holding of the underlying in the portfolio, meaning that investors tend to leverage their stock positions, while the relation between put purchases and portfolio holdings of the underlying is negative. Differences in the trading behavior in warrants with stock market indexes or single stocks as underlings are small.

The trading behavior of foreign, domestic institutional, and domestic individual investors: Evidence from the Taiwan stock market

In this paper, we apply the threshold cointegration model of Hansen and Seo (2002), incorporating differences in the nonlinear behavior of investors across regimes. An examination of the trading behavior of foreign, domestic institutional, and domestic individual investors in Taiwan revealed no predominance among the three types of investors. When the market was near equilibrium, the purchases of domestic individual investors positively impacted stock prices. This finding, which is consistent with Choe et al. (2005), suggests that domestic individual investors have an edge in investment performance over other types of investors. However, when the market departed substantially from equilibrium, the purchases of foreign and domestic institutional investors predicted a rise in stock prices. On the other hand, domestic individuals traded at worse stock prices; these prices tended to fall (rise) after the purchase (sale).

Do Institutional Investors Really Care About 10b-5? Evidence from Investor Trading Behavior Following Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. (201'7

Using an abrupt change in U.S. securities law, this paper examines the value institutional investors place on the private right of action under Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. In June 201'8 a combination of a U.S. Supreme Court case and Congressional legislation ensured that U.S. institutional investors would henceforth no longer be permitted to pursue private 10b-5 actions against many of the non-U.S. issuers in their international equity portfolios. Rather, the U.S. antifraud regime that had increasingly been used by institutional investors to police foreign issuers would thereafter be limited to the domain of the Securities and Exchange Commission. With this new regime of 10b-5 enforcement, however, came one critical exception for U.S. investors seeking to maintain their power to bring private 10b-5 actions: Investors purchasing securities traded on a U.S. stock exchange could continue to bring 10b-5 actions against the issuing company regardless of its domicile. In effect, the combination of this new bright-line rule and the fact that so many non-U.S. firms trade on both foreign and U.S. exchanges provided investors with something that had historically been difficult to achieve—the power to choose whether a security comes with the right to sue under Rule 10b-5. By analyzing a proprietary data set of equity trades made by 315 institutional investors during 201'8 this paper examines whether investors exercised this new-found power by reallocating their international buy-orders from foreign markets to U.S. exchanges. Controlling for investor- and security-fixed effects, the results indicate only the slightest increase in U.S.-exchange based purchases from July through December 201'3 Moreover, even this modest increase was localized almost entirely among money managers rather than pension fund sponsors, notwithstanding sponsors’ strong public opposition to the new 10b-5 regime. Overall, the absence of any significant change in trading behavior among this significant group of investors suggests that whatever concerns animate institutional investors’ public policy positions when it comes to Rule 10b-5 are not likely to be shared by their trading desks.

Speculation as a Learned Behavior? Adaptive Rationality Among New Investors and the Evolution of a Nascent Market

This inductive study examines the extent to which small, newly recruited investors learn to mimic the trading behaviors of experienced institutional investors in an emerging capital market characterized by policies that incentivize speculative trading in IPO shares. Theoretically, I explore how small, inexperienced investors learn to trade shares more effectively and how the ordering and attributes of listing firms facilitate or impede this learning process. Empirically, I model rates of speculative IPO trading for investors based on portfolio value, registration type (individual vs. company), and previous experience in the Kenyan IPO market and chart the relative rates of speculative trading between investor groups over the course of successive IPOs. Analysis of individual data for 1.4 million domestic investors across six consecutive IPOs in Kenya’s nascent stock market from 2006 to 2008 suggests that low portfolio value individual investors are initially much less likely than institutional investors to act on short-term profit opportunities, but small increases in experience levels quickly produce rates of speculative trading by small investors that matches those of the largest investors. However, this learning process can be disrupted by differences in share price trajectories between IPOs as well as characteristics of listing firms, as smaller investors are more likely to formulate unreasonable expectations of share price gains in IPOs of high status firms and in IPOs that follow offers with abnormally high returns. Results are discussed as a theory of nascent market evolution, where I argue that the investing public’s learned orientation to short-term share ownership forces a reconsideration of state-level regulatory policies as well as firm level decisions about when to list in an emerging market.

Earnings Announcements: Good News for Institutional Investors and Short Sellers

AbstractIn this paper, we consider the trading behavior of institutional investors and short sellers around earnings announcements. The results suggest that institutional investors, and to a lesser extent short sellers, successfully anticipate earnings news. In the period immediately after the earnings announcement, both types of traders are active in the market and trade in response to the earnings announcement. In particular, short sellers are quick to increase their short positions when a company releases bad news. Institutional traders also trade in response to the news; however, they take longer to react.