We study the joint responses of commodity futures prices and positions of various trader groups to changes of the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) before and after the recent financial crisis. Financial traders reduced their net long positions during the crisis in response to market distress, while...

The world is still facing a financial crisis that started in mid 2007 and up to moment it is unsolved. Stock markets around the world reacted badly and the real time news has never played such an important role to investors as seen in previous crises. The impact of the media deepened the bear...

Extant literature consistently documents that investors tilt their domestic equity portfolios towards regionally close stocks (local bias). We hypothesize that individual investors' local bias is not limited to the domestic sphere but instead also determines their international investment...

In his Berkshire Hathaway annual newsletter to investors c.20 years ago, Warren Buffett while discussing the Long Term Capital Management LTCM and Enron collapses, famously called derivatives: "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially...

We measure investors' short- and long-term stock-return expectations using both options and survey data. These expectations at different horizons reveal what investors think their own short-term expectations will be in the future, or forward return expectations. While contemporaneous short-term...

We analyze the effect of geographic proximity on individual investors’ portfolio choice. Using a unique data set which covers the common stockholdings of private households at regional banks in Germany, we document strong and consistent overinvestment in geographically close companies. Our...

Within this study we propose different measures to prove the influence of prior retail fund performance on fund flows. In contrast to previous literature, our work indicates that investors behave directly and in a selective manner by redeeming their shares of poor performing funds. By using a...

Hedge funds significantly reduced their equity holdings during the recent financial crisis. In 2008Q3-Q4, hedge funds sold about 29% of their aggregate portfolio. Redemptions and margin calls were the primary drivers of selloffs. Consistent with forced deleveraging, the selloffs took place in...

Human judgments are systematically affected by various biases and distortions. The main goal of our study is to analyze the effects of five well-documented behavioral biases—namely, the disposition effect, herd behavior, availability heuristic, gambler’s fallacy and hot hand fallacy—on the...

Extant literature consistently documents that investors tilt their domestic equity portfolios towards regionally close stocks (local bias). We hypothesize that individual investors’ local bias is not limited to the domestic sphere but instead also determines their international investment...