Market-wide Investor Sentiment Research Articles

Effect of Market-Wide Investor Sentiment on South African Government Bond Indices of Varying Maturities under Changing Market Conditions

The excess levels of investor participation coupled with irrational behaviour in the South African bond market causes excess volatility, which in turn exposes investors to losses. Consequently, the study aims to examine the effect of market-wide investor sentiment on government bond index returns of varying maturities under changing market conditions. This study constructs a new market-wide investor sentiment index for South Africa and uses the two-state Markov regime-switching model for the sample period 2007/03 to 2024/01. The findings illustrate that the effect investor sentiment has on government bond indices returns of varying maturities is regime-specific and time-varying. For instance, the 1–3-year government index return and the over-12-year government bond index were negatively affected by investor sentiment in a bull market condition and not in a bear market condition. Moreover, the bullish market condition prevailed among the returns of selected government bond indices of varying maturities. The findings suggest that the government bond market is adaptive, as proposed by AMH, and contains alternating efficiencies. The study contributes to the emerging market literature, which is limited. That being said, it uses market-wide investor sentiment as a tool to make pronunciations on asset selection, portfolio formulation, and portfolio diversification, which assists in limiting investor losses. Moreover, the findings of the study contribute to settling the debate surrounding the efficiency of bond markets and the effect between market-wide sentiment and bond index returns in South Africa. That being said, it is nonlinear, which is a better modelled using nonlinear models and alternates with market conditions, making the government bond market adaptive.

Interaction between investor sentiment, limits to arbitrage and the returns of stock market anomalies: evidence from the UK stock market

This study investigates the role of two prominent concepts in finance: limits to arbitrage and investor sentiment in stock prices. The study examines how changes in market-wide investor sentiment and limits to arbitrage can affect the performance of nine UK stock market anomalies. The extant literature relating to investor sentiment focuses mainly on the US stock market, whilst research on the UK market typically examines aggregated index-level data. In addition, previous studies have focused on examining investor sentiment and limits to arbitrage separately. Using data from UK-listed companies over the period January 1997 to December 2019, the study finds that five stock market anomalies were related to changes in UK investor sentiment and produced significantly higher returns following periods of high investor sentiment, while the effect of limits to arbitrage was mostly limited. However, the interaction analysis provided support to the limits to arbitrage theory and demonstrated that the effect of high investor sentiment on stock market anomalies was more pronounced when combined with high limits to arbitrage and had less effect during periods characterised by low limits to arbitrage.

Firm-specific investor sentiment and earnings management: evidence from Brazil

PropósitoEl propósito de este estudio es investigar la influencia del sentimiento de los inversionistas a nivel de empresa en la manipulación contable de las empresas brasileñas entre 2010 y 2018. El documento pretende aportar una visión más profunda sobre la relación entre las expectativas de los inversores y la toma de decisiones de los gestores en un mercado emergente.Diseño/metodologia/enfoqueusamos el enfoque cuantitativo y aplicamos un modelo de regresión lineal múltiple para probar la relación entre las acumulaciones anormales, el índice de sentimiento de los inversores a nivel de empresa y las variables de control. La muestra final incluye datos de 175 empresas, entre 2010 y 2018.HallazgosLos resultados revelan una asociación negativa entre el sentimiento de los inversores a nivel de empresa y la manipulación contable basada em acumulaciones, lo que podría significar que la propensión al riesgo de los administradores a manipular las ganancias aumenta cuando enfrentan pérdidas conocidas en el mercado de capitales.Limitaciones/implicaciones de la investigaciónlos resultados de la investigación proporcionan una valiosa comprensión de cómo las expectativas de los mercados de capitales emergentes pueden influir en las decisiones de gestión, como la manipulación contable basada en acumulaciones. El área geográfica de estudio se limitó únicamente a Brasil y, en consecuencia, los hallazgos y conclusiones del estudio tuvieron sus límites.Originalidad/valorestudios anteriores sobre mercados desarrollados muestran que el sentimiento de los inversores a nivel de mercado influye positivamente en la manipulación contable. Sin embargo, el presente estudio muestra que el índice de sentimiento de los inversores a nivel de empresa tiene una relación significativa y negativa con la manipulación de las ganancias de las empresas brasileñas, mientras que el sentimiento del mercado indica una relación contradictoria en estudios anteriores en el país.

Long-term earnings growth forecasts: investor sentiment or valuation difficulty?

PurposeThis article analyzes the hypothesis that analysts issue higher long-term earnings growth (LTG) forecasts following a market-wide investor sentiment.Design/methodology/approachThis study analyzed 193 publicly traded Brazilian firms listed on B3 (Brasil, Bolsa, Balcão), totaling 2,291 observations. To address the potential selection bias resulting from analysts' preference for more liquid firms, this study used the Heckman model in the analysis with samples with only one analyst and the entire sample. The study also applied other robustness tests to ensure the reliability of the findings.FindingsThe results suggest that market-wide investor sentiment influences LTG when the firm's stocks are difficult to value. Market optimism did not reflect five-year profit growth after the forecast issue, suggesting lower forecast accuracy during high investor sentiment values.Practical implicationsVolatile-earnings firms have relevant implications in LTG forecasts during bullish moments. According to the study’s evidence, investors' decisions and policymakers' and regulators' rules should consider analysts' expertise as independent information when considering LTG as input for valuation models, even under market optimism.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the literature on the influence of investor sentiment on analysts' forecasts by incorporating two crucial elements in the discussion: the scenario free from herding behavior, as usually only one analyst issues LGT forecast for Brazilian firms, and the analysis of research hypotheses incorporates the difficulty of pricing a firm given the uncertainty of its earnings as an explanation to bullish forecast.

Information Asymmetry and Analyst Forecast in Market-Wide Investor Sentiment

This study investigates the role of market-wide investor sentiment on the level of information asymmetry and analyst forecast error. The role of market-wide investor sentiments in the valuation and forecasts by analysts is still uncertain. In addition to this, the role of market-wide investor sentiment in influencing information asymmetry between the market participants is a pertinent question. This study attempts to close this gap by answering the impact of market-wide investor sentiment on information asymmetry and analyst forecasting dispersion. The study utilized the data of public listed firms in the USA and employed multiple regression fixed effect model to estimate the results. The results concluded that investor sentiment increases the information asymmetry and analyst forecast errors. That confirms that optimistic investor sentiment brings in the noise of trading and unsophisticated trading mechanism in the stock market, thereby questioning the classical theory of finance, which only relies on the fundamental analysis. The study provides important insights for the investors and analysts to incorporate behaviors and sentiments while undertaking valuation and trading decisions.

Firm life cycle, expectation errors and future stock returns

I study the return predictability of firm life cycle, originally documented by Dickinson (2011). I show that a hedge portfolio strategy going long on mature firms and short on introduction firms generates a significant hedge portfolio return of 1.29% per month in return-weighted portfolios and 0.72% in value-weighted portfolios. The returns to firm life cycle are related to investors’ and analysts’ expectation errors, are driven by market-wide investor sentiment, and are more pronounced among stocks with low institutional ownership and high idiosyncratic volatility. Quantile regressions show that introduction firms have considerably greater uncertainty and skewness in future earnings growth outcomes than mature firms, such that analysts are better able to justify optimistically biased forecasts for introduction firms compared to mature firms.

The Effect of Investor Sentiment on Nonprofit Donations

Prior work shows that capital market participants including investors, analysts, and managers are all impacted by the prevailing level of investor sentiment. We extend this line of work by investigating whether the effects of sentiment spill over into the nonprofit sector by affecting donors’ spending to support moral causes. While donors are driven by ethical, altruistic, and other utility-maximizing motives, it is unclear whether behavioral biases stemming from sentiment would influence donors’ decisions to give. We shed light on this issue using a large industry-diverse panel of over 115 thousand organization-years from 2008 to 2016. Results indicate that nonprofit organizations receive less in stock-based donations and more in cash-based donations during periods of high investor sentiment. Our inquiry separately considers cash and stock-based donations because we expect, and find, that market-related sentiment impacts these types of contributions differently. Moreover, we find that these effects are stronger for organizations with large donors, who are more closely tied to the capital markets, and therefore more susceptible to investor sentiment, as well as charitable organizations, consistent with “tug-at-the-heartstrings” type appeals inducing more emotional donation response. Taken together, the results suggest that market-wide investor sentiment impacts nonprofit organizations and the effects vary in the cross-section.

Investor Sentiment and the (Discretionary) Accrual-return Relation

Discretionary accruals are positively associated with stock returns at the aggregate level but negatively so in the cross section. Using Baker-Wurgler investor sentiment index, we find that a significant presence of sentiment-driven investors is important in accounting for both patterns. We document that the aggregate relation is only prominent during periods of high investor sentiment. Similarly, the cross-section relation is considerably stronger in high-sentiment periods in both economic magnitude and statistical significance. We then embed investor sentiment into a stylized model of earnings management, and illustrate that a positive (negative) relationship between stock returns and earnings management can endogenously emerge in the aggregate (cross section). Our analysis suggests that the (discretionary) accrual-return relation at both the aggregate and firm levels at least partially reflects mispricing that is related to market-wide investor sentiment.

Sentiment, Loss Firms, and Investor Expectations of Future Earnings

This study investigates the mispricing of market-wide investor sentiment by exploring the relation between sentiment and investor expectations of future earnings. Prior research argues that sentiment-driven mispricing should be most pronounced for hard-to-value firms, such as those reporting losses (Baker and Wurgler 2006). Using investor expectations of future earnings, we provide empirical results consistent with this behavioral finance theory. We predict and find that investors perceive losses to be more (less) persistent during periods of low (high) sentiment; that (in contrast) investors perceive profit persistence to be lower (higher) during periods of low (high) sentiment; and that the effects appear stronger for loss firms relative to profit firms. We also document predictable cross-sectional variation within losses, with the mispricing mitigated for losses associated with activities expected to generate future benefits: R&D, growth, large negative special items, and severe financial distress. Overall, our results document a new and important channel—investor expectations of future earnings—to explain sentiment-driven mispricing.

Herd behaviour & investor sentiment: Evidence from UK mutual funds

The aims of this paper are to detect evidence of institutional investor herding behaviour and examine the role that investor sentiment plays in institutional investor herding behaviour. The herding behaviour is investigated by examining the dispersion of time varying beta of UK open-end and closed-end funds. The study finds evidence of fund managers' herding behaviour, which suggests they are likely to herd on market portfolio, size, and value factors. UK market-wide investor sentiment index is used for investigating the effects of investor sentiment on institutional herding behaviour. We find a unidirectional investor sentiment effect on the herding of UK mutual fund managers. We also reveal that the sentiment factors affecting UK open-end and closed-end fund managers herding behaviour are different due to the differences in fund structure.

Investor sentiment and stock price: Empirical evidence from Chinese SEOs

We examine whether and how the market interacts with investor sentiment in the context of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) by Chinese listed firms. We adopt the component of market index return, which cannot be explained by fundamental macro-economic factors as a proxy for the market-wide investor sentiment, and overnight stock returns proxying for the firm-specific sentiment. We find robust evidence that investor sentiment drives the pre-announcement abnormal return. In the post-announcement period, the market corrects the sentiment-driven overvaluation within about one month. These findings reinforce the view that market timers take advantage of investor sentiment to issue seasoned shares.

Sentiment versus liquidity pricing effects in the cross-section of UK stock returns

This study examines the asset pricing role of ‘sentiment risk’ in UK stock returns. We define sentiment risk as the sensitivity of stock returns to investor sentiment in financial markets. We incorporate a broad range of financial market variables in measuring financial conditions and use this as a proxy for market-wide investor sentiment. The paper distinguishes between rational and irrational (noisy) investor sentiment. Initial findings indicate a strong role for rational sentiment risk in the returns of FTSE All-Share stocks. However, further analysis reveals that this sentiment risk pricing is detected in the FTSE All-Share subgroup of FTSE small-cap stocks, while no evidence of sentiment risk pricing is found among the FTSE All-Share subgroups of FTSE 250 and FTSE 100 stocks. Our paper makes a key contribution by identifying that evidence of rational sentiment risk pricing disappears after controlling for the liquidity risk features of stocks. More generally, our findings point to a strong relation between sentiment risk and liquidity risk in stock returns and to the need for careful disentangling of sentiment versus liquidity effects.

Sentiment Versus Liquidity Pricing Effects in the Cross-Section of UK Stock Returns

This study examines the asset pricing role of ‘sentiment risk’ in stock returns in the case of the UK stock market. We define sentiment risk as the sensitivity of stock returns to investor sentiment in financial markets. We incorporate a broad range of financial market variables in measuring financial conditions and use this as a proxy for market-wide investor sentiment. The paper distinguishes between rational and irrational (noisy) investor sentiment. Initial findings indicate a strong role for rational sentiment risk in the returns of FTSE All Share stocks. However, our paper makes a key contribution by identifying that this evidence largely disappears after controlling for the liquidity risk features of stocks. No evidence of sentiment risk pricing is found among the subgroups of FTSE 250 and FTSE 100 stocks. More generally, our findings point to a strong relation between sentiment risk and liquidity risk in returns and the need for careful disentangling of sentiment versus liquidity effects.

Firm Life Cycle, Expectation Errors and Future Stock Returns

I study the return predictability of firm life cycle, originally documented by Dickinson (2011). I show that a hedge portfolio strategy going long on mature firms and short on introduction firms generates a significant hedge portfolio return of 1.4% per month in return-weighted portfolios and 0.75% in value-weighted portfolios. The returns to firm life cycle are related to investors’ and analysts’ expectation errors, are driven by market-wide investor sentiment, and are more pronounced among stocks with low institutional ownership and high idiosyncratic volatility. Quantile regressions show that introduction firms have considerably greater uncertainty and skewness in future earnings growth outcomes than mature firms, such that analysts are better able to justify optimistically biased forecasts for introduction firms compared to mature firms.

Investor Sentiment and Bond Risk Premia: Evidence from China

ABSTRACTThis article shows the statistical significance of a set of variables related to market sentiment and uses them to predict the risk premium embedded in China’s sovereign bonds. We construct a composite index of market-wide investor sentiment as a linear combination of proxies for a degree of market participation and risk appetite of investors. Further, we show that these sentiment-related factors can be summarized in a single-return forecasting factor, similar in a spirit of Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). Our empirical results show that this sentiment factor has predictive power beyond that contained in the yield curve and macroeconomic variables, and this predictability is robust for out-of-sample testing. In addition, the predictive power of the sentiment factor shows relevance during the 2008 global financial crisis, indicating that the forecasting ability of investor sentiment is mainly derived by a sentiment-induced “flight-to-quality.”

The sentiment premium and macroeconomic announcements

Limits to arbitrage imply that market-wide investor sentiment should be a priced factor in the US equity market. While previous studies (Baker and Wurgler in J Financ 61:1645–1680, 2006) focus on the factor loading on market-wide investor sentiment, we study its factor premium in the present paper. This is important, because both factor loadings and premiums are required to estimate expected returns on stocks, which are essential for capital budgeting, portfolio evaluation, investment, and risk analysis decisions. If overpricing is more prevalent than underpricing (Stambaugh et al. in J Financ Econ 104:288–302, 2012), the premium on market-wide investor sentiment should be negative. Furthermore, the sentiment premium should be particularly significant on days without macroeconomic announcements, because there is a lack of information about the state of the economy at such times. We test these hypotheses in this paper, and find supporting evidence. Our findings have important theoretical as well as practical implications.

INDIVIDUAL MEAN-VARIANCE RELATION AND STOCK-LEVEL INVESTOR SENTIMENT

This research studies the effect of stock-level investor sentiment on individual stock returns’ mean-variance relation. Using unique buy and sell volume data of retail investors in Korean stock market, we find that a positive mean-variance relation is undermined among high-sentiment stocks, but holds among low-sentiment stocks. We adopt buy-sell imbalances of retail investors for individual stocks as a measure of stock-level investor sentiment. Further, our findings provide empirical evidence of a strong riskreturn trade-off among stocks with low retail concentration (e.g., large capitalization, high-priced, and growth stocks). Existing research only analyzes market-wide investor sentiment. However, we study the effect of stock-level investor sentiment on individual stock returns. Therefore, our findings suggest novel implications about the investment strategy that the stock-level investor sentiment is important when constructing portfolios based on variance.

Investor sentiment, stock mispricing, and long-term growth expectations

I analyze whether or not market-wide investor sentiment induces stock mispricing, by affecting the boldness of predictions of firms’ long-term earnings growth. I predict that bullish market-wide sentiment induces investors to aggressively separate firms with high growth futures from others, and that this excessive boldness results in a high level of mispricing. Consistent with my prediction, I observe an excessively large dispersion in consensus growth forecasts when proxies for investor sentiment are high at the beginning of the period. Furthermore, stocks with higher-predicted growth experience more negative forecast revisions and lower subsequent stock returns, especially following periods of high investor sentiment.

Market-Wide Investor Sentiment, Growth Forecasts, and Cross-Sectional Stock Returns

I analyze whether or not market-wide investor sentiment induces stock mispricing, by affecting the boldness of predictions of firms’ long-term earnings growth. I predict that bullish market-wide sentiment induces investors to aggressively separate firms with high growth futures from others, and that this excessive boldness results in a high level of mispricing. Consistent with my prediction, I observe an excessively large dispersion in consensus growth forecasts when proxies for investor sentiment are high at the beginning of the period. Furthermore, stocks with higher-predicted growth experience more negative forecast revisions and lower subsequent stock returns, especially following periods of high investor sentiment.

Aggregate Investment and Investor Sentiment

Using bottom-up information from corporate financial statements, we examine the relation between aggregate investment, future equity returns, and investor sentiment. Consistent with the business cycle literature, corporate investments peak during periods of positive sentiment, yet these periods are followed by lower equity returns. This pattern exists in most developed countries and survives controls for discount rates, equity flows, valuation multiples, operating accruals, and other investor sentiment measures. Higher aggregate investments also precede greater earnings disappointments, lower short-window earnings announcement returns, and lower macroeconomic growth. We conclude aggregate corporate investment is an alternative, and possibly sharper, measure of market-wide investor sentiment.