We present evidence that market sentiment is positively priced in the cross-section of stock returns in low-sentiment periods. We estimate individual stock exposure to market sentiment and find that, in periods of low market sentiment, stocks in the highest sentiment beta quintile generate a...

We propose idiosyncratic volatility based return spread as a new measure of the stock-level value of investor sophistication. We find that stocks with a high value of investor sophistication tend to have low average returns, and this effect is pronounced for highly short-sale constrained stocks....