Animal Spirits

How much do equity investors leave on the table by focusing on categories of stocks (industry or style) and paying little attention to individual stocks? In her July 2013 paper entitled “Categorical Thinking in Portfolio Choice”, Swasti Gupta-Mukherjee investigates whether such simplifying categorical thinking is economically beneficial and what factors magnify or diminish it. She focuses on managers of U.S. equity mutual funds. She defines a Categorical Thinking Index (CTI) as relative emphasis on category-wide information relative to stock-specific information for making portfolio adjustments. She implements CTI based on two-digit SIC codes (broad industries) as categories. Each quarter, she measures CTI for a mutual fund based on the explanatory power of past industry returns for portfolio changes relative to the explanatory power of past individual stock returns for these changes. Using monthly returns, quarterly holdings and style (benchmark) representations for 2,812 U.S. equity mutual funds, along with associated industry and individual stock returns, during 1990 to 2011, she finds that: Keep Reading

How do individuals perceive and position for Black Swans? In his March 2013 paper entitled “The Psychology of Tail Events: Progress and Challenges”, Nicholas Barberis employs a two-step framework to summarize recent research on the psychology of tail events. He first addresses belief about the probability of a tail event. He then covers actions/decisions based on this belief, with focus on the concept of probability weighting. Based on the available body of research, he finds that: Keep Reading

How do relevant electronic social networks affect individual investing? In their March 2012 paper entitled “Facebook Finance: How Social Interaction Propagates Active Investing”, Rawley Heimer and David Simon investigate the propagation of active investing strategies within a Facebook-like social network of retail foreign exchange traders. Registered users of this free network (who must have a qualified foreign exchange broker account) have access to: (1) an indicator of the aggregate positions of the entire network in specific currency pairs; and, (2) a real-time view of the trading activity of mutually accepted “friends.” The network receives information about user trades instantly from qualified brokers. Using a complete record of activities within this network involving more than 5,500 foreign exchange traders, two million time-stamped trades and 140,000 messages and friendships mostly between February 2009 and December 2010, they find that: Keep Reading

How do individual investors adjust trading behaviors during bull and bear markets? Are any such adjustments advantageous? In their December 2011 paper entitled “Don’t Confuse Brains with a Bull Market: Attribution Bias, Market Condition, and Trading Behavior of Individual Investors”, Zhen Shi and Na Wang examine the trading behaviors of individual investors during different market conditions. They apply a regime switching model to the Chinese stock market to identify: a normal market during January 2005 through August 2006; a bull market during September 2006 through October 2007; and, a bear market during November 2007 through November 2008. They define excessiveness of trading based on two measures: (1) the performance of stocks bought versus that of stocks sold; and, (2) the relationship between portfolio turnover and performance. Using the trading records of 15,040 randomly selected individual Chinese investors during January 2005 through November 2008 (2,357,959 trades), they find that: Keep Reading

Are firm earnings announcements bound to confound stock traders? In their November 2011 paper entitled “Systematic Noise and News-Driven Return Reversals”, Eric So and Sean Wang examine trading behavior around quarterly earnings announcements. They define pre-announcement return as the market-adjusted return over a three-day window from five days before through three days before earnings announcement date. Each quarter, they sort stocks into quintiles by pre-announcement return, with quintile break points from the distribution of the prior calendar quarter to avoid look-ahead bias. They adjust announcement date one trading day forward for announcements after the market close. Using 183,228 earnings announcement dates and contemporaneous daily stock and stock market returns during 1990 through 2009, they find that: Keep Reading

Is science making progress in deconstructing the animal spirits at play in financial markets? In the October 2011 draft of his chapter entitled “Fear, Greed, and Financial Crises: A Cognitive Neurosciences Perspective”, Andrew Lo explores the neuroscientific underpinnings of those human behaviors most relevant to financial system risk. Citing a range of uncontrolled (opportunistic) and controlled experiments on brain operations, he finds that: Keep Reading

Does short-term (one-month) stock return reversal persist? If so, is there a best way to refine and exploit it? In their March 2012 paper entitled “Short-Term Return Reversal: the Long and the Short of It”, Zhi Da, Qianqiu Liu and Ernst Schaumburg decompose the total short-term reversal into an across-industry component (long prior-month loser industries and short prior-month winner industries) and a within- industry component (long prior-month loser and short prior-month winner stocks within each industry). They then further decompose the within-industry return reversal into three components related to: (1) variation in three-factor (market, size, book-to-market) expected stock returns; (2) underreaction/overreaction to within-industry cash flow news (relative to analyst forecasts); and, (3) a residual component attributable to discount rate news/liquidity shocks. Using monthly data for a broad sample of relatively large and liquid stocks accounting for about 75% of U.S. equity market capitalization over the period January 1982 through March 2009, they conclude that: Keep Reading

Do investors focus on dividends, thereby elevating associated stock prices as ex-dividend date approaches? In the September 2011 draft of their paper entitled “The Dividend Month Premium”, Samuel Hartzmark and David Solomon examine the price behavior of stocks with scheduled quarterly, semiannual and annual dividends during the expected dividend month and around expected ex-dividend dates. Using daily and monthly price and cash dividend data for a broad sample of U.S. stocks during January 1927 through December 2009, along with widely used risk adjustment factors, they find that: Keep Reading

Does the semantic tone of an earnings announcement, as measured independently of the level of earnings surprise, affect stock price reaction. In his September 2011 paper entitled “Short-term Reactions to News Announcements”, Michal Dzielinski investigates the effect of the tone (positive, neutral or negative) of the words in earnings announcements and other company news on stock prices from two days before to ten days after release. He averages news tone for each stock by day, with news released before (after) the market close counting as current-day (next-day) news. Using daily return data and over six million automatic, real-time Thomson Reuters news sentiment (tone) measurements (including those for over 68,000 earnings announcements) for 4,750 U.S. stocks during 2003 through 2010, he finds that: Keep Reading

Do investors in aggregate respond to “staged” CEO visibility? In the August 2011 update of their paper entitled “CEO Interviews on CNBC”, Felix Meschke and Andy Kim investigate whether planned interviews with CEOs on financial television systematically affect associated stock prices over the days before and after the interview. The authors focus on the interval from two trading days before through ten trading days after interview date. Using daily stock price and trading data associated with 6,937 CEO interviews broadcast on CNBC during June 1997 through December 2006 (9.5 years), along with contemporaneous CNBC viewership levels and corporate news, they find that: Keep Reading