Divergence in investor beliefs is an important driver of the negative relation between option trading volume and future stock returns. We find a strong negative relation between disagreement-based option trades and future stock returns, and this relation is markedly amplified when the underlying...

While Merton (1987) proposes that firm value increases with the number of shareholders, relatively few studies have explicitly sought to identify the factors that affect investor participation per se in equity markets. Using a unique dataset that measures the inflow and outflow of equity...

We show meetings of investors and firms convey information about expected returns. Investors frequently travel to meet in-person with firms before investing, and we show firms with abnormally frequent meetings predictably outperform firms with abnormally infrequent meetings by roughly 70-to-100...

Using a unique data set of complete trade records, we find that large individual investors are successful at picking stocks. Large individual investors' correlated trades not only can move synchronous stock prices but also can positively predict future returns. More importantly, large individual...

Although many papers have examined the Saudi stock market, to date none have explored the influence of religiosity on the behavior of stock prices, taking into account the dominance of individual investors. These characteristics distinguish the Saudi stock market from other mature and immature...

We study the effects of belief dispersion on stock trading volume. Unlike most of the existing work on the subject, our paper focuses on how household investors' disagreements on macroeconomic variables influence market-wide trading volume. We show that greater belief dispersion among household...

The stock market generates less wealth than it appears. We show that total shareholder return (TSR), the standard measure of stock investor performance, substantially exaggerates returns earned by these investors in aggregate, and thus by most investors. The main reason: from investors'...

Purpose: People often face constraints such as a lack of time or information in taking decisions, which leads them to use heuristics. In these situations, fast and frugal rules may be useful for making adaptive decisions with fewer resources, even if it leads to suboptimal choices. When applied...

This paper examines the relation between equity portfolio diversification choices of individual investors and stock returns. Using a six-year panel (1991-96) of individual investors, I find that stocks with less diversified individual investor clientele earn higher returns. A zero cost portfolio...

In this paper, we intend to explain an empirical finding that distressed stocks delivered anomalously low returns (Campbell et. al. (2008)). We show that in a model where investors have heterogeneous preferences, the expected return of risky assets depends on idiosyncratic coskewness betas,...