We show that Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses preferences can explain several puzzling retail investor behaviors, including the excessive trading of small local stocks. Status concerns lead households, especially those living in affluent areas, to demand these stocks to track their neighbors' wealth....

This paper studies the trading behavior of individual Chinese investors before and during the recent financial crisis.We have three major findings: (i) individual investors did not withdraw their capital from the equity market during the crisis; instead, they reduced investments following...

This paper studies the effectiveness of technical trading approaches in market environments of varying sentiment. Due to short-sale constraints, overpricing with high sentiment (i.e. relatively optimistic sentiment) is more prevalent compared to underpricing with low sentiment (i.e. relatively...

It has been widely documented that investment decisions of individual investors exhibit local bias. Yet little is known of how societal forces affect investors' portfolio allocations of local versus nonlocal assets. We propose that social capital, and trust in particular, decreases the local...

By comparing the trading behavior of individual investors in different market conditions, this paper tests the theory that attribution bias - inflated confidence in one's own skill - creates overconfident traders. In a bull market, investors incorrectly attribute trading successes (luck) to...