This paper proposes a risk-based explanation of the momentum anomaly on equity markets. Regressing the momentum strategy return on the return of a self-financing portfolio going long (short) in stocks with high (low) crash sensitivity in the USA from 1963 to 2012 reduces the momentum effect from...

Traditional finance is built on the rationality paradigm. This chapter discusses simple models from an alternative approach in which financial markets are viewed as complex evolutionary systems. Agents are boundedly rational and base their investment decisions upon market forecasting heuristics....

We investigate whether alternative asset classes should be included in optimal portfolios of the most prominent investor personae in the Behavioral Finance literature, namely, the Cumulative Prospect Theory, the Markowitz and the Loss Averse types of investors. We develop a stochastic spanning...

We investigate asset returns using the concept of beta herding, which measures cross-sectional variations in betas induced by investors whose beliefs about the market are biased due to changes in confidence or sentiment. Overconfidence or optimistic sentiment causes beta herding (compression of...

The behaviour of market agents has always been extensively covered in the literature. Risk averse behaviour, described by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) via a concave utility function, is considered to be a cornerstone of classical economics. Agents prefer a fixed profit over uncertain...

We provide some new tools to evaluate trading strategies. When it is known that many strategies and combinations of strategies have been tried, we need to adjust our evaluation method for these multiple tests. Sharpe Ratios and other statistics will be overstated. Our methods are simple to...

We study the stock return comovements from two different perspectives, one being trading behaviour-induced return comovements and the other volatility-induced return comovements. Following Baker and Wurglur (2006), we construct an investor sentiment index and examine whether it has relationship...

The behaviour of market agents has always been extensively covered in the literature. Risk averse behaviour, described by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) via a concave utility function, is considered to be a cornerstone of classical economics. Agents prefer a fixed profit over uncertain...

Beta-sorted portfolios—portfolios comprised of assets with similar covariation to selected risk factors—are a popular tool in empirical finance to analyze models of (conditional) expected returns. Despite their widespread use, little is known of their statistical properties in contrast to...

We test the hypothesis that retail investors' attraction to lottery stocks induces overvaluation, and is amplified by high attention and social interactions. The lottery premium (negative abnormal returns) is stronger for high-retail-ownership stocks—especially those that also have high...