Purpose: High levels of turnover in financial markets are consistent with the notion that trading, like gambling, yields direct utility to some agents. The purpose of this paper is to show that the presence of these agents attenuates covariance risk pricing and volatility, and implies a...

We analyze trading activity accompanying equities’ switches from “growth” (low book‐tomarket ratios (BMRs)) to “value” (high BMRs), and vice versa. We find that a large BMR increase, that is a shift from growth to value, is accompanied by a strongly negative small order imbalance...

When agents first become active investors in financial markets, they are relatively inexperienced. Much of the literature focuses on the incentives of presumably sophisticated informed agents to produce information, and not on the nave agents. However, unsophisticated agents are important...