Animal Spirits

How often should an investor/trader check the performance of their positions? Does it make a difference (psychologically) whether one checks frequently or infrequently? In their 2005 paper entitled “The Scaling Property of Randomness: The Impact of Reporting Frequency on The Perceived Performance of Investment Funds”, Nigel Finch, Guy Ford, Suresh Cuganesan and Tyrone Carlin use actual investment fund performance data to explore the likelihood that an investor would have viewed the performance as positive or negative based on sampling frequency. Applying prospect theory (a loss in wealth has a negative impact 2.25 times greater in magnitude than the positive impact of a gain in wealth) to data for four large Australian investment funds (see table below), they conclude that: Keep Reading

Can influential traders actively profit from the psychological biases, the not fully rational decisions, of others? In the January 2005 update of their paper entitled “Illusionary Finance and Trading Behavior”, Malika Hamadi, Erick Rengifo and Diego Salzman introduce the concept of illusionary finance, based on the psychology of decision-making under time pressure and ambiguity, and analyze the creation and dissemination of illusions stock markets. They propose that: Keep Reading

Is this how a savvy hedge fund manager plays the game? First, get cozy with other fund managers, financial market research firms and the financial media. Then “orchestrate” the attention paid to a company in which the manager’s fund has taken a position? Here’s a picture, with some links to relevant allegations and news/commentary… Keep Reading

What formal studies does academia have to offer on the role of emotions in equity investing/trading? In their October 2004 paper entitled “The Role of Feelings in Investor Decision-Making”, Michael Dowling and Brian Lucey synthesize the results of two threads of recent areas of research on whether and how emotions affect investing: (1) mood misattribution (the impact of environmental factors, such as the weather, the body’s biorhythms and social factors); and (2) image (how investors feel about companies separately from any financial analysis). They note that: Keep Reading

The Internet enables rapid flow and ebb of trading memes. Trend followers hope to ride a meme and get out before it fades. Contrarians take the other side in anticipation of the fade. Traditional tools for inferring memes include price-volume action and market sentiment. Do emerging information-filtering technologies present novel ways of discovering investing/trading memes from surges of news on the web? Building on ideas offered in the article “Finding Signals in the Noise” from Technology Review, we offer a few possible meme-detectors: Keep Reading

We have selected for retrospective review a few all-time “best selling” research papers of the past few years from the General Financial Markets category of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Here we summarize the October 2002 paper entitled “From Efficient Markets Theory to Behavioral Finance” (download count over 4,100) by Robert Shiller, author of the book Irrational Exuberance. This paper traces the recent history of financial market research, from an erosion of faith in the efficient markets theory to a growing collaboration between the social sciences and finance. Shiller’s key points are: Keep Reading

In their September 2004 paper entitled “Once Burned, Twice Shy: How Naive Learning and Counterfactuals Affect the Repurchase of Stocks Previously Sold”, Terrance Odean, Michal Strahilevitz and Brad Barber examine how past experience with a stock affects the average investor’s subsequent actions regarding that stock. Using trading records for 66,465 households at a large discount broker during 1991-1996 and 665,533 investors at a large retail broker during 1997-1999, they show that the average investor tends to: Keep Reading

Given the vast amount of information available, investors must filter source data ruthlessly. In their May 2005 paper entitled “Investor Attention, Overconfidence and Category Learning”, Lin Peng and Wei Xiong model investor allocation of attention to markets/sectors and stocks and examine how attention allocation process affects asset prices. Emphasizing that attention is a scarce cognitive resource, they find that: Keep Reading

In the May 2005 update of their paper entitled “Optimism and Economic Choice”, Manju Puri and David Robinson use data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (conducted every three years since 1989) to investigate the economic decisions of optimists, including financial portfolio construction. Defining optimism based on the mismatches between the life expectancies estimated by respondents for themselves and those indicated independently by actuarial tables (optimists expect to live longer than indicated actuarially), they find that: Keep Reading

In the June 2005 update of their paper entitled “All that Glitters: The Effect of Attention and News on the Buying Behavior of Individual and Institutional Investors”, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean examine the behaviors of individuals and institutions regarding attention-grabbing stocks. Using four datasets spanning 1991-1999 and focus on three measures associated with attention grabbing events (news, unusual trading volume and extreme returns), they find that: Keep Reading