Using proprietary data on millions of trades by retail investors, we provide the first large-scale evidence that retail short selling predicts negative stock returns. A portfolio that mimics weekly retail shorting earns an annualized risk-adjusted return of 9%. The predictive ability of retail...

We find that the acceleration and deceleration patterns of historical prices are predictive of future expected returns in momentum investing in the U.S. equity market from 1962 to 2014. Winners with accelerated historical price increases deliver higher future expected returns and losers with...

I investigate whether the relation between investor sentiment and profitable trading strategies is due to short sale constraints. I find that the average security in these strategies is not hard-to-short. Furthermore, the short leg does not appear to be harder to short or more overvalued than...

We discuss the finding that cross-sectional characteristic based models have yielded portfolios with higher excess monthly returns but lower risk than their arbitrage pricing theory counterparts in an analysis of equity returns of stocks listed on the JSE. Under the assumption of general...

From 1992 to 2011, average R2 increased from 0.17 to 0.47. During this period, passive financial institutions also grew their ownership from 30 to 50% of the market. Passive investors do not perform fundamental research nor trade around firm-specific news, thus reducing the firm-specific...

We investigate whether a simple long-short weekly trading strategy based on mispricing among ETNs generates profits in excess of the S&P 500 over the sample period of June 6, 2006 to January 30, 2012. Ignoring transaction costs, liquidity, and short selling constraints we find the following. (1)...

We develop a High Frequency (HF) trading strategy where the HF trader uses her superior speed to process information and to post limit sell and buy orders. By introducing a multi-factor mutually-exciting process we allow for feedback effects in market buy and sell orders and the shape of the...

We create a market-wide measure of dispersion in options investors' expectations by aggregating across all stocks the dispersion in trading volume across moneynesses (DISP). DISP exhibits strong negative predictive power for future market returns and its information content is not subsumed by...

An analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finance shows that wealthy investors have a higher return on their stocks than their poorer counterparts. Three key empirical facts emerge: (i) wealthy investors employ more productive search efforts, (ii) financial risk bearing and search efforts are...

This paper analyzes the interaction between investor overconfidence, share turnover, return volatility and the disposition effect. I create a measure for investor overconfidence using posted price target updates retrieved from Yahoo!Finance online message boards. I find that posters are slow to...