We examine institutional demand prior to well-known stock return anomalies and find that institutions have a strong tendency to buy stocks classified as overvalued (short leg of anomaly), and that these stocks have particularly negative ex-post abnormal returns. Our results differ from numerous...

We examine institutional investor demand for stocks that are categorized as mispriced according to twelve well-known pricing anomalies. We find that institutional demand during the year prior to anomaly portfolio formation is typically on the wrong side of the anomalies' implied mispricing. That...