Uninformed Traders Research Articles

Reinforcement learning and rational expectations equilibrium in limit order markets

This paper shows that simple payoff-based reinforcement learning can help to achieve rational expectations equilibrium in limit order markets. In equilibrium, speculators mainly supply liquidity, while liquidity consumption increases in the private values of no-speculators with intrinsic motives for trade. Driven by information acquisition of the non-speculators, liquidity consumption is hump-shaped in fundamental volatility for the speculators but U-shaped for the non-speculators. In contrast, liquidity supply decreases in fundamental volatility for the speculators but is hump-shaped for the non-speculators. Unlike the informed traders who trade on asset fundamentals, the uninformed traders trade more on order book and trading information.

Social media attention and retail investor behavior: Evidence from r/wallstreetbets

This paper studies the influence of Reddit social media attention on investor risk-taking and welfare using individual trading data from a large trading platform. We show that attention generated on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets (WSB) spurs uninformed trading, also in short positions. WSB attention increases overall risk levels as investors trade riskier stocks and allocate larger portfolio shares to new positions. WSB attention significantly reduces holding period returns (HPRs). Positions created when WSB attention is at its highest realize -8.5% HPRs, while the average HPR across all investments is positive. Investment decisions of retail investors are more likely to be based on emotional responses to angry and disgusted user contributions on Reddit rather than analyst investment advice.

투자심리와 주식 유동성 간의 관계

This paper empirically investigates the relation of investors' sentiment and stock liquidity. Particularly, this research explores whether investors' sentiment is related to stock liquidity and whether the level of individual trading and information environment in each firm affects the relation. Three hypotheses were drawn and tested. To test the hypotheses, stock prices and relevant data of firms listed on Korea Exchange(KRX) were put together, and the hypotheses were studied by panel and Fama-MacBeth regressions. This research discovers that investor sentiment has positive effects on stock liquidity. Further, this study finds that the level of individual trading and the level of information environment increases the positive relation between investors' sentiment and stock liquidity. This work finds individual trading and information has a certain role in the relationship between investors sentiment and stock liquidity. The findings suggest that increased investor sentiment may cause noise trading to increase. In addition, firms with more uninformed trading may have a more liquid stock market.

Voting for insider trading regulation. An experimental study of informed and uninformed traders’ preferences

Capital markets often regulate insider trading, but whether such regulation aligns with traders’ preferences is an open question. This study examined traders’ regulation preferences conditional on their prospects of becoming informed. Of 64 referenda, traders decided 41 (64%) against regulation. Moreover, traders’ prospects of becoming informed significantly impacted the outcomes of the referenda. In markets in which a group of traders has no chance of receiving inside information, 47% of the referenda are decided against regulation. When all traders could get such information, 81% are. Individual votes reveal that traders who know they will remain uninformed support regulation in 69.27% of the cases, while informed traders do so only 8.33% of the time. Traders who may or may not become informed support regulation 33.33% of the time.

Why does price deviate from net asset value? The case of Singaporean infrastructure REITs

This paper examines the determinants of the changes in premiums to Net Asset Value (NAV) in infrastructure REIT (infra-REIT) share prices in Singapore over the 2017–2021 period. Samples of 11 listed Singaporean REITs (S-REITs) are selected to create a balanced panel data for the analysis. Our finding shows that infrastructure S-REITs have generally been trading at premiums to their NAVs. The first part of the analysis shows that REIT premiums are positively related to REIT size (market cap) and percentage of institutional ownership. On the other hand, REIT premiums are negatively related to dividend yield. Volatility, volume, ROE and liquidity are found to be insignificant in explaining price and NAV divergence. The second part of the analysis finds that there is a higher proportion of uninformed (noise) traders when infrastructure S-REIT prices are diverging from their NAV. This finding supports the Noise theory which implies that there is some evidence that noise traders are present in the infrastructure S-REIT market and their actions might cause irrational departure of REIT prices from the underlying NAV.

Corporate bond price reversals

I demonstrate empirically that corporate bond dealers mitigate adverse selection risk by passing potentially informed transactions to institutional investors. I contrast price reversals following days with abnormal trading volume across bonds with different information asymmetry. In informed trading, the part of reversal specific to high-volume days should increase with information asymmetry. In uninformed trading, there is no such effect. Following high-volume days when investors provide liquidity, the reversals are consistent with the former case. When dealers provide liquidity, I observe the latter. The results suggest that the informational content of bond prices is higher when dealers do not take inventory.

Price limit relaxation and stock price crash risk: Evidence from China

This paper investigates the impact of price limit relaxation on stock price crash risk, based on the change in the daily price limit in the ChiNext market in August 2020. We find that the widening of price limits significantly reduces stock price crash risk. This result is robust to parallel trend and placebo tests. Furthermore, we show that widening price limits can help lower information asymmetry between informed and uninformed traders, thereby decreasing bad news hoarding and reducing stock price crash risk.

Public debt management announcements: A welfare-theoretic analysis

Before an auction, public debt managers (DMs) announce the number of bonds to be sold to primary dealers (PDs); however, the empirical evidence suggests that when “beat-the-market” opportunities arise, more bonds than announced are auctioned. A micro foundation for this result resides in PDs’ sale of bonds to uninformed traders, thereby extracting information rents. These rents give rise to two counteracting effects. On the one hand, they create an auction premium that motivates DMs to overissue. On the other hand, they motivate traders to learn the bond value, which increases market expertise, mitigating the auction premium and issuance bias. A credible announcement policy raises welfare by increasing the auction premium, depressing the issuance bias, and reducing traders’ need to invest in market expertise.

Information, market power and welfare

We study the market for a risky asset in which traders are heterogeneous both in terms of their value for the asset and the information that they have about this value. Traders behave strategically and use the equilibrium price to extract information that is relevant to them. Due to adverse selection, uninformed traders are less willing than the informed to provide liquidity. We evaluate the impact of a change in the size or composition of the investor population on price informativeness, liquidity and welfare, with applications to the rise of passive investing and the adoption of ESG standards.

Noise traders in an agent-based artificial stock market

AbstractThis paper investigates whether noise traders can survive in the long run and how they influence financial markets by proposing an agent-based artificial stock market, as one simulation model of computational economics. This market contains noise traders, informed and uninformed traders. Informed and uninformed traders can learn from information by using Genetic Programming, while noise traders cannot. The system is first calibrated to real financial markets by replicating several stylized facts. We find that noise traders cannot survive or they just transform to other kind of traders in the long run, and they increase market volatility, price distortion, noise trader risk, and trading volume in the market. However, regulation intervention, e.g., price limits, transaction tax and longer settlement cycle, can affect noise trader’s surviving period and their influence on markets.

Director trades, profitability and market efficiency: New evidence

We investigate if directors of Australian companies can generate abnormal returns on their reported trades, if these abnormal returns are significant enough to be mimicked by outsiders, and if insider trades have an effect on returns of other investors. We find that insiders take advantage of their private information in stocks of larger corporations, but generally do not in medium and small capitalization firms, indicating that the insiders are attracted to the liquidity and a greater presence of uninformed traders in large stocks. We find that outsiders can make profitable trades net of transaction costs by following insiders’ sale trades in large and medium size firms, otherwise tracking insider trades result in net losses for outsiders. They accumulate on average a net abnormal profit of 4.17 % after a year following insiders sale trades. We propose that market quality can be improved with public access to good quality aggregated data on reported director insider trades.

Breaking news headlines: Impact on trading activity in the cryptocurrency market

Publicly available information plays a crucial role in shaping cryptocurrency investor sentiments. Past literature has used various measures to proxy sentiment. In this study, we construct a cryptocurrency-specific news sentiment from daily cryptocurrency news headlines. The sentiments are classified into positive and negative news sentiments to understand their differential impact on the trading activity of the cryptocurrency market. The results show that positive news boosts investor confidence, thereby increasing returns, and negative news causes uncertainty. The most dominant cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, experiences a “negativity effect,” i.e., the impact of negative news on returns is higher than positive news. On the volatility and liquidity front, positive (negative) news increases (decreases) the volatility and liquidity. Positive news triggers the participation of uninformed traders who buy due to the “fear of missing out” phenomenon and pump-and-dump schemes. Negative news reduces liquidity by creating uncertainty among informed and uninformed traders.

Costs and benefits of trading with stock dealers: The case of systematic internalizers

AbstractSystematic internalizers are single‐dealer platforms run by investment firms that trade out of their own inventories by internalizing the trades off exchanges. We analyze the determinants of dealers' market shares and trading costs. We find that dealer trades have lower price impacts than exchange trades, consistent with uninformed traders seeking out dealers. Due to their ability to avoid trading with informed investors, dealers often undercut the exchange bid–ask spread when the spread is wide and the tick size is not binding. Dealers can therefore offer lower trading costs and gain a higher market share relative to exchanges.

Information and optimal trading strategies with dark pools

This paper examines the effects of the competition between asset trading venues with different levels of transparency: an opaque dark pool alongside a transparent exchange organized as a limit order book (two-venue market). In a model with asymmetric information, we compare traders’ strategies and market performance in the two-venue market with that of a single-venue market (trading only in the exchange). We show that price informativeness is lower in the two-venue market when informed traders migrate to the dark pool and uninformed investors remain in the exchange. We also find that when orders migrate to the dark pool in the first period, market liquidity is lower (higher) in the two-venue market for high (low) fundamental volatility stocks as traders migrating to the dark pool would have demanded (supplied) liquidity in the exchange. Finally, the expected profits of informed traders are never lower in the two-venue market, but this may not always be true for uninformed traders.

Insider trading regulation and trader migration

Discussions about insider trading regulation veer between the poles of forbidding insider trading to protect market integrity and allowing insider trading to foster informational efficiency. We study traders’ preferences for regulation by offering them concurrent markets with different regulatory regimes in an experimental setting. We find that informed traders’ preference for the unregulated market causes both informed and uninformed traders to be more active in the unregulated market. This market, thus, sees more trading volume, lower spreads, and less mispricing. Nevertheless, uninformed traders suffer greater losses in unregulated markets, while informed traders profit from the absence of regulation.

Financial innovation in the uranium mining sector: analysis of an exchange-traded fund and its impact on trading characteristics of uranium stocks

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the impact of a recent innovation in the uranium market, the Global X Uranium Exchange-Traded Fund (URA), on the trading characteristics of constituent and non-constituent stocks.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analyse bid-ask spread measures, relative effective spreads and adverse selection costs to assess changes in information asymmetry among uranium stocks. The authors also study abnormal returns to assess the impact of URA on the market.FindingsOver a three-month period, following the introduction of URA, the authors find uranium stocks display decreased bid-ask spread measures, driven by reductions in information asymmetry. Relative effective spreads decrease by 36% after the introduction of URA, and adverse selection costs decline by 24% over the same period. Uranium stocks experience a significant positive abnormal return of 5.0% the day after the introduction of URA with subsequent price reversals. These suggest that the introduction of URA prompted uninformed traders to rebalance portfolios and migrate to the less information-sensitive Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF), causing temporary deviations in trading characteristics.Originality/valueThe authors demonstrate that the introduction of new financial securities to the market can have a significant impact on the trading characteristics of related equities. As URA is the only ETF in the uranium sector, the authors thereby avoid the influence of multiple ETFs that may have impacted previous studies.

Strategic trading and manipulation in trade at settlement contracts

AbstractTrade at settlement (“TAS”) contracts are widely employed by futures exchanges. They are an example of a “derived pricing” mechanism that reduces the transactions costs of uninformed traders. However, TAS contracts are susceptible to strategic, and indeed manipulative, trading by large intermediaries. Those with large TAS positions can profit from trading strategically/manipulatively, and this trading tends to cause excessive price movements. Moreover, some of the price impacts of such strategic trading are permanent. The severity of strategic/manipulative trading and its effects depends on the concentration of TAS positions, and information on concentration and price movements can be used to detect such trading.

Liquidity shocks and intraday price reaction

AbstractUsing a global sample of high‐frequency data, I investigate how liquidity shocks affect intraday price movements. I find a negative association between liquidity shocks and price impact. This finding remains robust after considering the exogeneity of liquidity shocks, using alternative windows to measure liquidity shocks, and controlling for volume shocks and volatility shocks. Additional tests show that the documented relation stems from idiosyncratic shocks and sell‐order shocks. Moreover, I find that liquidity shocks are likely driven by uninformed traders. My evidence suggests that the market requires 30 min to accomplish price adjustments when meeting liquidity shocks.

Impact of Post-Trade Transparency on Investors: Evidence from an Emerging Market

This study examines the effects of a post-trade transparency event on the payoff to informed and uninformed traders of large and small size firms. The evidence indicates that the event leads to a significant decrease in the payoff only to informed traders of large firms, while there is little change in the payoff to other investors. The implications are two-fold, that the event is beneficial to market fairness for large firms although it has the drawback of discouraging informed traders from producing/sharing information; and secondly, the event has no universal and equivalent impact for different groups of investors.

Do uninformed traders move prices? Evidence from the Bank of Japan's ETF purchasing program

AbstractUsing the Bank of Japan (BoJ) ETF purchasing program as an exogenous shock to stock demand, we find that stocks with a higher BoJ demand experience higher positive abnormal returns on BoJ ETF purchase dates, which only partially revert in the long term. Our findings support the hypothesis that stocks have a downward‐sloping demand curve, implying that uninformed traders can cause a permanent shift in price.