Microeconomic modeling of investors behavior in financial markets and its results crucially depends on assumptions about the mathematical shape of the underlying preference functions as well as their parameterizations. With the purpose to shed some light on the question, which preferences...

This paper investigates market-level and private investor trading patterns and performance around earnings announcements. We document clear evidence for abnormal trading around earnings announcements for both the entire market and households in Germany and observe that private investor...

Manipulative communications touting stocks are common in capital markets around the world. Although the price distortions created by so-called “pump-and-dump” schemes are well known, little is known about the investors in these frauds. By examining 421 “pump-and-dump” schemes between...

Based on recent empirical evidence which suggests that as investors gain experience, their investment performance improves, we hypothesize that the specific mechanism through which experience translates into better investment returns is closely related to learning from investment mistakes. To...

We use transaction-level data of portfolio trades and holdings linked to checking, savings, and settlement account transactions and balances to explore how individuals respond to realized capital gains and losses. We exploit plausibly exogenous sales due to mutual fund liquidations for...

We relate Google search volumes, proxying for economic concerns of households (FEARS), to individual investor trading. The trading data come from a large German brokerage covering more than 100 thousand investors over ten years. When FEARS is high, individual investors are on the sell side of...