We provide empirical support for the conventional wisdom that there are times when optimistic investors tend to build their hopes into castles in the air, and pay a large premium over intrinsic value for stocks of firms in the early stages of their life cycles with perceived growth...

We provide novel evidence supporting the view that stock prices of some firms in the early growth stage of their life cycle are set by optimistic investors fixated on sales growth. We identify these firms as those that went public during an industry IPO waves, had high sales growths but low...

We show that a mutual fund's stock selection skill can be decomposed into additional components that include impatient quot;informed tradingquot; and quot;liquidity provision.quot; We validate our method by verifying that liquidity providing trades are the primary source of value for the...