Individual investors who hold common stocks directly pay a tremendous performance penalty for active trading. Of 66,465 households with accounts at a large discount broker during 1991 to 1996, those that trade most earn an annual return of 11.4 percent, while the market returns 17.9 percent. The...

"We ask whether the typical investor and the aggregate investor exhibit a bias known as the disposition effect, the tendency to sell investments that are held for a profit at a faster rate than investments held for a loss. We analyse all trading activity on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) for...

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

In this paper, we compare the investment decisions of groups (stock clubs) and individuals. Both individuals and clubs are more likely to purchase stocks that are associated with good reasons (e.g., a company that is featured on a list of most-admired companies). However, stock clubs favor such...

We argue that the purchase decisions of mutual fund investors are influenced by salient, attention-grabbing information. Investors are more sensitive to salient, in-your-face fees, like front-end loads and commissions, than operating expenses; they buy funds that attract their attention through...

We analyze trading records for 66,465 households at a large discount broker and 665,533 investors at a large retail broker to document that the trading of individuals is highly correlated and persistent. This systematic trading of individual investors is not primarily driven by passive reactions...

Theoretical models predict that overconfident investors trade excessively. We test this prediction by partitioning investors on gender. Psychological research demonstrates that, in areas such as finance, men are more overconfident than women. Thus, theory predicts that men will trade more...

We test and confirm the hypothesis that individual investors are net buyers of attention-grabbing stocks, e.g., stocks in the news, stocks experiencing high abnormal trading volume, and stocks with extreme one-day returns. Attention-driven buying results from the difficulty that investors have...