Animal Spirits

How does the market react when firms announce adoption of blockchain technology? In the May 2019 draft of their paper entitled “Bitcoin Speculation or Value Creation? Corporate Blockchain Investments and Stock Market Reactions”, Don Autore, Nicholas Clarke and Danling Jiang study stock price reactions to initial public announcements of investments in blockchain technology by listed U.S. firms. Their key metric is buy-and-hold abnormal return (BHAR) relative to each of five benchmarks: (1) portfolios of stocks matched on size and book-to-market (BM); (2) portfolios of stocks matched on market beta; 3) a broad value-weighted market index; (4) iShares Global Financials ETF (IXG); and, (5) iShares Global Tech ETF (IXN). Their announcement event windows is five trading days before initial public announcement of an investment in blockchain technology (-5) to 65 trading days after (65). Using dates of initial public announcements of investments in blockchain technology and contemporaneous daily returns for 207 stocks listed on NYSE and NASDAQ during October 2008 through March 2018, they find that:

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Who do investors trust more, expert advisors or algorithms? In her March 2019 paper entitled “Algorithmic Decision-Making: The Death of Second Opinions?”, Nizan Packin employs a survey conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk to assess automation bias when making significant investment decisions. Each of four groups of respondents received one of the following four questions (response scale 1 to 5):

1. “You decide to invest 15% of your savings in the stock market. You find a reputable stockbroker, who makes investment recommendations. How confident are you that you got the best recommendation possible for your investment?”
2. “You decide to invest 60% of your savings in the stock market. You find a reputable stockbroker, who makes investment recommendations. How confident are you that you got the best recommendation possible for your investment?”
3. “You decide to invest 15% of your savings in the stock market. You find a reputable online automated investment advisor, who makes investment recommendations. How confident are you that you got the best recommendation possible for your investment?”
4. “You decide to invest 60% of your savings in the stock market. You find a reputable online automated investment advisor, who makes investment recommendations. How confident are you that you got the best recommendation possible for your investment?”

A followup question asked about level of comfort trusting again the same expert (human or algorithmic) after learning that the initial recommendation resulted in a significant loss. Analyses included controls for respondent age, gender, socioeconomic status, having some college education, race and political ideology (liberal/conservative). Based on 800 total responses to specified survey questions, she finds that: Keep Reading

How does investor competitiveness (a goal of relative rather than absolute wealth) affect optimal allocations? In their February 2019 paper entitled “The Growth of Relative Wealth and the Kelly Criterion”, Andrew Lo, Allen Orr and Ruixun Zhang compare optimal portfolios for maximizing relative wealth versus absolute wealth at both short and long investment horizons. They define an individual’s relative wealth as fraction held of total wealth of all investors. Their model assumes that investors allocate to two assets, one risky and one riskless. They identify when an investor should allocate according to the Kelly criterion (series of allocations that maximize terminal wealth over the long run) and when the investor should deviate from it. Based on derivations and modeling, they conclude that:

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Does persistence in the difference in direction between overnight stock trading and intraday stock trading behaviors (tug of war) predict future returns? In their January 2019 paper entitled “Overnight Returns, Daytime Reversals, and Future Stock Returns: The Risk of Investing in a Tug of War with Noise Traders”, Ferhat Akbas, Ekkehart Boehmer, Chao Jiang and Paul Koch investigate relationships between intensity of the daily tug-of-war between between overnight (noise) and intraday (other) stock traders and future stock returns. They specify tug-of-war intensity as percentage of trading days during a month for which a stock exhibits negative (or positive) daytime reversals divided by average monthly percentage of negative (or positive) reversals over the last 12 months. They then examine whether either negative or positive tug-of-war intensity predicts future stock returns. Using overnight/intraday stock returns for a broad sample of U.S. common stocks, along with monthly returns for widely accepted factors, during May 1993 through December 2017, they find that:

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A “pump-and-dump” scheme promoter: (1) builds a position in a stock (often a thinly traded penny stock); (2) gooses its price by spreading misleading information; and, (3) liquidates the position once the stock reaches. Who responds to such schemes and what are their returns? In the December 2018 revision of their paper entitled “Who Falls Prey to the Wolf of Wall Street? Investor Participation in Market Manipulation”, Christian Leuz, Steffen Meyer, Maximilian Muhn, Eugene Soltes and Andreas Hackethal investigate pump-and-dump scheme participation rate, purchase size/returns and participant characteristics. Specifically, they explore the intersection of 421 such schemes (both from the responsible German regulatory agency and hand-selected) and trading records/demographics for 113,000 randomly selected individual investors from a major German bank. Using the specified data spanning 2002 through 2015, they find that:

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Does the lunar cycle still (since our last look seven years ago) affect the behavior of investors/traders, and thereby influence stock returns? In the August 2001 version of their paper entitled “Lunar Cycle Effects in Stock Returns” Ilia Dichev and Troy Janes conclude that: “returns in the 15 days around new moon dates are about double the returns in the 15 days around full moon dates. This pattern of returns is pervasive; we find it for all major U.S. stock indexes over the last 100 years and for nearly all major stock indexes of 24 other countries over the last 30 years.” To refine this conclusion and test recent data, we examine U.S. stock returns around new and full moons since 1990. When the date of a new or full moon falls on a non-trading day, we assign it to the nearest trading day. Using dates for new and full moons for January 1990 through August 2018 as listed by the U.S. Naval Observatory (355 full and 354 new moons) and contemporaneous daily closing prices for the S&P 500 Index, we find that: Keep Reading

Larry Connors introduces his 2018 book, Buy the Fear, Sell the Greed: 7 Behavioral Quant Strategies for Traders, by stating in Chapter 1 that the book shows when, where and how: “…to trade directly against traders and investors who are having…feelings of going crazy and impending doom. …The goal of this book is to make you aware of when and why short-term market edges exist in stocks and in ETFs, and then give you the quantified strategies to trade them. …Thirty years ago, when a news event would occur, it could take days to assimilate it. …The only thing that’s changed is the timing of their emotion; today it occurs faster and at times is more extreme primarily due to the role the media (and especially social media) plays in disseminating the news that triggers this behavior.” Based on analyses of specific trading setups using data through 2017, he finds that: Keep Reading

Brian Portnoy introduces his 2018 book, The Geometry of Wealth: How To Shape A Life Of Money And Meaning, by stating that the book is: “…a story told in three parts,…from purpose to priorities to tactics. Each step has a primary action associated with it. The first is adaptation. The second is prioritization. The third is simplification. …The principle that motors us along the entire way is what I call ‘adaptive simplicity,’ a means of both rolling with the punches and and cutting through the noise.” Based on his two decades of experience in the mutual fund and hedge fund industries, including interactions with many investors, along with considerable cited research (much of it behavioral), he concludes that: Keep Reading

How do so many active managers who underperform passive investment alternatives continue to attract and retain investors? In their June 2018 paper entitled “How Active Management Survives”, J.B. Heaton and Ginger Pennington test the hypothesis that investors fall prey to the  conjunction fallacy, believing that hard work should generate outperformance. Specifically, they conduct two online surveys:

• Sample 1: 1,004 respondents over 30 with household income over $100,000 choosing which of two propositions is mostly likely true: “(1) ABC Fund will earn a good return this year for its investors. (2) ABC Fund will earn a good return this year for its investors and ABC Fund employs investment analysts who work hard to identify the best stocks for ABC Fund to invest in.”
• Sample 2: 1,001 respondents over 30 with household income over $100,000 choosing which of two propositions is mostly likely true: “(1) ABC Fund will earn a good return this year for its investors. (2) ABC Fund will earn a good return this year for its investors and ABC Fund was founded by a successful former Goldman Sachs trader and employs Harvard-trained physicists and Ph.D. economists and statisticians.”

Second choices are inherently less likely because they include the first choices and add conditions to them. The authors further ask in both surveys the degree to which respondents agree that a “person or business can achieve better results on any task by working harder than its competitors.” Using responses to these surveys, they find that: Keep Reading

Do firms with predictable sales seasonality continually “surprise” investors with good high season (bad low season) sales and thereby have predictable stock return patterns? In their May 2018 paper entitled “When Low Beats High: Riding the Sales Seasonality Premium”, Gustavo Grullon, Yamil Kaba and Alexander Nuñez investigate firm sales seasonality as a stock return predictor. Specifically, for each quarter, after excluding negative and zero sales observations, they divide quarterly sales by annual sales for that year. To mitigate impact of outliers, they then average same-quarter ratios over the past two years. They then each month:

1. Use the most recent average same-quarter, two-year sales ratio to predict the ratio for next quarter for each firm.
2. Rank firms into tenths (deciles) based on predicted sales ratios.
3. Form a hedge portfolio that is long (short) the market capitalization-weighted stocks of firms in the decile with the lowest (highest) predicted sales ratios.

Their hypothesis is that investors undervalue (overvalue) stocks experiencing seasonally low (high) sales. They measure portfolio monthly raw average returns and four alphas based on 1-factor (market), 3-factor (market, size, book-to-market), 4-factor (adding momentum to the 3-factor model) and 5-factor (adding profitability and investment to the 3-factor model) models of stock returns. Using data for a broad sample of non-financial U.S common stocks during January 1970 through December 2016, they find that: Keep Reading